And here (as in some
other matters) this curious pair discovered a reflex identity of taste,
rare enough in the happiest of conventional couples, but a gratuitous
irony in the makers of a merely nominal marriage. Their mutual feelings
towards each other were a quantity unknown to either; but about a third
person they were equally outspoken and unanimous. Thus they had fewer
disagreements than many a loving couple, and perhaps more points of
insignificant contact, while all the time there was not even the
pretence of love between them. Their lives made a chasm bridged by
threads.
This was not seen by more than two of their acquaintance. Morna Woodgate
had both the observation and the opportunities to see a little how the
land lay between them. Charles Langholm had the experience and the
imagination to guess a good deal. But it was little enough that Morna
saw, and Langholm's guesses were as wide of the mark as only the guesses
of an imaginative man can be. As for all the rest--honest Hugh Woodgate,
the Venables girls, and their friends the young men in the various
works, who saw the old-fashioned courtesy with which Steel always
treated his wife, and the grace and charm of her consideration for
him--they were every one receiving a liberal object lesson in matrimony,
as some of them even realized at the time.
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