me to his own expansive, confiding
nature a certain austerity and stiffness of fibre in her which for the
moment chilled him. But as he got her into talk about the neighborhood,
the people and their ways, the impression vanished again, so far at
least, as there was anything repellent about it. Austerity, strength,
individuality, all these words indeed he was more and more driven to
apply to her. She was like no other woman he had ever seen. It was not
at all that she was more remarkable intellectually. Every now and then,
indeed, as their talk flowed on, he noticed in what she said an
absence of a good many interests and attainments which in his ordinary
south-country women friends he would have assumed as a matter of course.

'I understand French very little, and I never read any,' she said to him
once, quietly, as he fell to comparing some peasant story she had told
him with an episode in one of George Sand's Berry novels. It seemed to
him that she knew her Wordsworth by heart. And her own mountain life,
her own rich and meditative soul, had taught her judgments and comments
on her favorite poet which stirred Elsmere every now and then to
enthusiasm--so true they were and pregnant, so full often of a natural
magic of expression. On the other hand, when he quoted a very well-known
line of Shelley's she asked him where it came from. She seemed to him
deeper and simpler at every moment; her very limitations of sympathy
and knowledge, and they were evidently many, began to attract him. The
thought of her ancestry crossed him now and then, rousing in him now
wonder, and now a strange sense of congruity and harmony. Clearly she
was the daughter of a primitive unexhausted race. And yet what purity,
what refinement, what delicate perception and self-restraint!

Presently they fell on the subject of Oxford.

'Were you ever there?' he asked her.

'Once,' she said. 'I went with my father one summer term. I have only,
a confused memory of it--of the quadrangles, and a long street, a great
building with a dome, and such beautiful trees!'

'Did your father often go back?'

'No; never toward the later part of his life'--and her clear eyes
clouded a little, 'nothing made him so sad as the thought of Oxford.'

She paused, as though she had strayed on to a topic where expression was
a little difficult. Then his big face and clerical dress seemed somehow
to reassure her, and she began again, though reluctantly.

'He used to say