Maggie went home, with an inward conflict already
begun; Philip went home to do nothing but remember
and hope. You can hardly help blaming him severely.
He was four or five years older than Maggie, and had
a full consciousness of his feeling toward her to
aid him in foreseeing the character his contemplated
interviews with her would bear in the opinion of a
third person. But you must not suppose that he
was capable of a gross selfishness, or that he could
have been satisfied without persuading himself that
he was seeking to infuse some happiness into Maggie’s
life,—seeking this even more than any direct
ends for himself. He could give her sympathy;
he could give her help. There was not the slightest
promise of love toward him in her manner; it was nothing
more than the sweet girlish tenderness she had shown
him when she was twelve. Perhaps she would never
love him; perhaps no woman ever could love
him. Well, then, he would endure that; he should
at least have the happiness of seeing her, of feeling
some nearness to her. And he clutched passionately
the possibility that she might love him; perhaps
the feeling would grow, if she could come to associate
him with that watchful tenderness which her nature
would be so keenly alive to. If any woman could
love him, surely Maggie was that woman; there was
such wealth of love in her, and there was no one to
claim it all. Then, the pity of it, that a mind
like hers should be withering in its very youth, like
a young forest-tree, for want of the light and space
it was formed to flourish in! Could he not hinder
that, by persuading her out of her system of privation?
He would be her guardian angel; he would do anything,
bear anything, for her sake—except not
seeing her.
Chapter II
Aunt Glegg Learns the Breadth of Bob’s Thumb
While Maggie’s life-struggles had lain almost
entirely within her own soul, one shadowy army fighting
another, and the slain shadows forever rising again,
Tom was engaged in a dustier, noisier warfare, grappling
with more substantial obstacles, and gaining more definite
conquests. So it has been since the days of Hecuba,
and of Hector, Tamer of horses; inside the gates,
the women with streaming hair and uplifted hands offering
prayers, watching the world’s combat from afar,
filling their long, empty days with memories and fears;
outside, the men, in fierce struggle with things divine
and human, quenching memory in the stronger light
of purpose, losing the sense of dread and even of
wounds in the hurrying ardor of action.
