er--her sterling loyalty; a loyalty that
embraced not only her dear ones themselves, but every stick and stone
belonging to them. His discovery of it helped him to understand her
allegiance to her own multicoloured family: in the beginning he had
almost doubted its sincerity. Now, he knew her better. It was just as
though a sixth sense had been implanted in Polly, enabling her to
pierce straight through John's self-sufficiency or Ned's vapourings, to
the real kernel of goodness that no doubt lay hid below. He himself
could not get at it; but then his powers of divination were the exact
opposite of Polly's. He was always struck by the weak or ridiculous
side of a person, and had to dig laboriously down to the virtues. While
his young wife, by a kind of genius, saw the good at a glance--and saw
nothing else. And she did not stint with her gift, or hoard it up
solely for use on her own kith and kin. Her splendid sympathy was the
reverse of clannish; it was applied to every mortal who crossed her
path.

Yes, for all her youth, Polly had quite a character of her own; and
even thus early her husband sometimes ran up against a certain native
sturdiness of opinion. But this did not displease him; on the contrary,
he would have thanked you for a wife who was only an echo of himself.
To take the case of the animals. He had a profound respect for those
creatures to which speech has been denied; and he treated the
four-footers that dwelt under his roof as his fellows, humanising them,
reading his own thoughts into them, and showing more consideration for
their feelings than if they had been able to speak up for themselves.
Polly saw this in the light of an exquisite joke. She was always kind
to Pompey and the stately Palmerston, and would as soon have forgotten
to set Richard's dinner before him as to feed the pair; but they
remained "the dog" and "the cat" to her, and, if they had enough to
eat, and received neither kicks nor blows, she could not conceive of
their souls asking more. It went beyond her to study the cat's dislike
to being turned off its favourite chair, or to believe that the dog did
not make dirty prints on her fresh scrubbed floor out of malice
prepense; it was also incredible that he should have doggy fits of
depression, in which up he must to stick a cold, slobbery snout into a
warm human hand. And when Richard tried to conciliate Palmerston
stalking sulky to the door, or to pet away the melancholy in the
rejec