As for Dent it was well-nigh the first anxiety that he had ever caused her.  If her affection for him was less poignant, being tenderness stored rather than tenderness exercised, this resulted from the very absence of his demand for it.  He had always needed her so little, had always needed every one so little, unfolding his life from the first and drawing from the impersonal universe whatever it required with the quietude and efficiency of a prospering plant.  She lacked imagination, or she might have thought of Dent as a filial sunflower, which turned the blossom of its life always faithfully and beautifully toward her, but stood rooted in the soil of knowledge that she could not supply.

What she had always believed she could see in him was the perpetuation under a new form of his father and the men of his father’s line.

These had for generations been grave mental workers:  ministers, lawyers, professors in theological seminaries; narrow-minded, strong-minded; upright, unbending; black-browed, black-coated; with a passion always for dealing in justice and dealing out justice, human or heavenly; most of all, gratified when in theological seminaries, when they could assert themselves as inerrant interpreters of the Most High.  The portraits of two of them hung in the dining room now, placed there as if to watch the table and see that grace was never left unsaid, that there be no levity at meat nor heresy taken in with the pudding.  Other portraits were also in other rooms—­they always had themselves painted for posterity, seldom or never their wives.

Some of the books they had written were in the library, lucid explanations of the First Cause and of how the Judge of all the earth should be looked at from without and from within.  Some that they had most loved to read were likewise there:  “Pollock’s Course of Time”; the slow outpourings of Young, sad sectary; Milton, with the passages on Hell approvingly underscored—­not as great poetry, but as great doctrine; nowhere in the bookcases a sign of the “Areopagitica,” of “Comus,” and “L’Allegro”; but most prominent the writings of Jonathan Edwards, hoarsest of the whole flock of New World theological ravens.

Her marriage into this family had caused universal surprise.  It had followed closely upon the scandals in regard to the wild young Ravenel Morris, the man she loved, the man she had promised to marry.  These scandals had driven her to the opposite extreme from her first choice by one of life’s familiar reactions; and in her wounded flight she had thrown herself into the arms of a man whom people called irreproachable.  He was a grave lawyer, one of the best of his kind; nevertheless he and she, when joined for the one voyage of two human spirits, were like a funeral barge lashed to some dancing boat, golden-oared, white-sailed, decked with flowers.  Hope at the helm and Pleasure at the prow.