charity for his weaknesses, Roderick would have, as the phrase is, a long row to hoe.  She spoke of Roderick as she might have done of a person suffering from a serious malady which demanded much tenderness; but if Rowland had found it possible to accuse her of dishonesty he would have said now that she believed appreciably less than she pretended to in her victim’s being an involuntary patient.  There are women whose love is care-taking and patronizing, and who rather prefer a weak man because he gives them a comfortable sense of strength.  It did not in the least please Rowland to believe that Mary Garland was one of these; for he held that such women were only males in petticoats, and he was convinced that Miss Garland’s heart was constructed after the most perfect feminine model.  That she was a very different woman from Christina Light did not at all prove that she was less a woman, and if the Princess Casamassima had gone up into a high place to publish her disrelish of a man who lacked the virile will, it was very certain that Mary Garland was not a person to put up, at any point, with what might be called the princess’s leavings.  It was Christina’s constant practice to remind you of the complexity of her character, of the subtlety of her mind, of her troublous faculty of seeing everything in a dozen different lights.  Mary Garland had never pretended not to be simple; but Rowland had a theory that she had really a more multitudinous sense of human things, a more delicate imagination, and a finer instinct of character.  She did you the honors of her mind with a grace far less regal, but was not that faculty of quite as remarkable an adjustment?  If in poor Christina’s strangely commingled nature there was circle within circle, and depth beneath depth, it was to be believed that Mary Garland, though she did not amuse herself with dropping stones into her soul, and waiting to hear them fall, laid quite as many sources of spiritual life under contribution.  She had believed Roderick was a fine fellow when she bade him farewell beneath the Northampton elms, and this belief, to her young, strenuous, concentrated imagination, had meant many things.  If it was to grow cold, it would be because disenchantment had become total and won the battle at each successive point.

Miss Garland had even in her face and carriage something of the preoccupied and wearied look of a person who is watching at a sick-bed; Roderick’s broken fortunes, his dead ambitions, were a cruel burden to the heart of a girl who had believed that he possessed “genius,” and supposed that genius was to one’s spiritual economy what full pockets were to one’s domestic.  And yet, with her, Rowland never felt, as with Mrs. Hudson, that undercurrent of reproach and bitterness toward himself, that impertinent implication that he had defrauded her of happiness.  Was this justice, in Miss Garland, or was it mercy?  The answer would have been difficult, for she had almost let Rowland feel before leaving Rome that she