Sometimes she thought it might not be Tommy, but herself, who was so unlike other people; that it was not he who was unable to love, but she who could not be loved.  This idea did not agitate her as a terrible thing; she could almost welcome it.  But she did not go to him with it.  While it might be but a fancy, that was no way to help a man who was overfull of them.  It was the bare truth only that she wanted him to see, and so she made elaborate inquiries into herself, to discover whether she was quite unlovable.  I suppose it would have been quaint, had she not been quite so much in earnest.  She examined herself in the long mirror most conscientiously, and with a determinedly open mind, to see whether she was too ugly for any man to love.  Our beautiful Grizel really did.

She had always thought that she was a nice girl, but was she?  No one had ever loved her, except the old doctor, and he began when she was so young that perhaps he had been inveigled into it, like a father.  Even David had not loved her.  Was it because he knew her so well?  What was it in women that made men love them?  She asked it of David in such a way that he never knew she was putting him to the question.  He merely thought that he and she were having a pleasant chat about Elspeth, and, as a result, she decided that he loved Elspeth because she was so helpless.  His head sat with uncommon pride on his shoulders while he talked of Elspeth’s timidity.  There was a ring of boastfulness in his voice as he paraded the large number of useful things that Elspeth could not do.  And yet David was a sensible and careful man.

Was it helplessness that man loved in woman, then?  It seemed to be Elspeth’s helplessness that had made Tommy such a brother, and how it had always appealed to Aaron!  No woman could be less helpless than herself, Grizel knew.  She thought back and back, and she could not come to a time when she was not managing somebody.  Women, she reflected, fall more or less deeply in love with every baby they see, while men, even the best of them, can look calmly at other people’s babies.  But when the helplessness of the child is in the woman, then other women are unmoved; but the great heart of man is stirred—­woman is his baby.  She remembered that the language of love is in two sexes—­for the woman superlatives, for the man diminutives.  The more she loves the bigger he grows, but in an ecstasy he could put her in his pocket.  Had not Tommy taught her this?  His little one, his child!  Perhaps he really had loved her in the days when they both made believe that she was infantile; but soon she had shown with fatal clearness that she was not.  Instead of needing to be taken care of, she had obviously wanted to take care of him:  their positions were reversed.  Perhaps, said Grizel to herself, I should have been a man.

If this was the true explanation, then, though Tommy, who had tried so hard, could not love her, he might be able to love—­what is the phrase?—­a more womanly woman, or, more popular phrase still, a very woman.  Some other woman might be the right wife for him.  She did not shrink from considering this theory, and she considered so long that I, for one, cannot smile at her for deciding ultimately, as she did, that there was nothing in it.