it upon I
would, saying I am to exercise my own faculties, and then hesitating and
finding fault."

"I daresay, my dear," said Mrs. Dennistoun, with great tolerance, "that
this may be provoking to your impatient mind: but you must put yourself
in my place a little, as I try to put myself in yours. I have never seen
Mr. Compton. It is probable, or at least quite possible, that if I knew
him I might look upon him with your eyes----"

"Probable! Possible! What words to use! when all my happiness, all my
life, everything I care for is in it: and my own mother thinks it just
possible that she might be able to tolerate the man that--the man
who----"

She flung herself down on her seat again, panting and excited. "Did you
wear out Adelaide like that," she cried, "before she married, papa and
you----"

"Adelaide was very different, Elinor. She married _salon les regles_ a
man whom we all knew. There was no trouble about it. Your father was
the one who was impatient then. He thought it too well arranged, too
commonplace and satisfactory. You may believe he did not object to that
in words, but he laughed at them and it worried him. It has done very
well on the whole," said Mrs. Dennistoun, with a faint sigh.

"You say that--and then you sigh. There is always a little reserve. You
are never wholly satisfied."

"One seldom is in this world," said Mrs. Dennistoun, this time with a
soft laugh. "This world is not very satisfactory. One makes the best one
can of it."

"And that is just what I hate to hear," said Elinor, "what I have always
heard. Oh, yes, when you don't say it you mean it, mamma. One can read
it in the turn of your head. You put up with things. You think perhaps
they might have been worse. In every way that's your philosophy. And
it's killing, killing to all life! I would rather far you said out,
'Adelaide's husband is a prig and I hate him.'"

"There is only one drawback, that it would not be true. I don't in the
least hate him. I am glad I was not called upon to marry him myself, I
don't think I should have liked it. But he makes Adelaide a very good
husband, and she is quite happy with him--as far as I know."

"The same thing again--never more. I wonder, I wonder after I have been
married a dozen years what you will say of me?"

"I wonder, too: if we could but know that it would solve the question,"
the mother said. Elinor looked at her with a provoked and impatient air,
which softened off after a momen