If he had not been at his post when
she expected him she would have had to stop and lean against something,
for weakness; her whole being would have throbbed more painfully than it
throbbed at present, though finding him there made her nervous enough.
And who was he, what was he? she asked herself. What did he offer her
besides a chance (in which there was no compensation of brilliancy or
fashion) to falsify, in a conspicuous manner, every hope and pledge she
had hitherto given? He allowed her, certainly, no illusion on the
subject of the fate she should meet as his wife; he flung over it no
rosiness of promised ease; he let her know that she should be poor,
withdrawn from view, a partner of his struggle, of his severe, hard,
unique stoicism. When he spoke of such things as these, and bent his
eyes on her, she could not keep the tears from her own; she felt that to
throw herself into his life (bare and arid as for the time it was) was
the condition of happiness for her, and yet that the obstacles were
terrible, cruel. It must not be thought that the revolution which was
taking place in her was unaccompanied with suffering. She suffered less
than Olive certainly, for her bent was not, like her friend's, in that
direction; but as the wheel of her experience went round she had the
sensation of being ground very small indeed. With her light, bright
texture, her complacent responsiveness, her genial, graceful, ornamental
cast, her desire to keep on pleasing others at the time when a force she
had never felt before was pushing her to please herself, poor Verena
lived in these days in a state of moral tension--with a sense of being
strained and aching--which she didn't betray more only because it was
absolutely not in her power to look desperate.
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