Now her faith in his discernment was shaken. His
treatment of her on the night of the ball had shocked, confused her. She
was ready to make allowance for him: she had told her story clumsily,
and had afterwards been both cross and obstinate; while part of his
violence was certainly to be ascribed to his coming breakdown. But this
did not cover everything; and the ungenerous spirit in which he had met
her frankness, his doubt of her word, of her good faith--his utter
unreasonableness in short--had left a cold patch of astonishment in
her, which would not yield. She lit on it at unexpected moments.
Meanwhile, she groped for an epithet that would fit his behaviour.
Beginning with some rather vague and high-flown terms she gradually came
down, until with the sense of having found the right thing at last, she
fixed on the adjective "silly"--a word which, for the rest, was in
common use with Mary, had she to describe anything that struck her as
queer or extravagant. And sitting over her fancywork, into which, being
what Richard called "safe as the grave," she sewed more thoughts than
most women: sitting thus, she would say to herself with a half smile and
an incredulous shake of the head: "SO silly!"
But hers was one of those inconvenient natures which trust blindly or
not at all: once worked on by a doubt or a suspicion, they are never
able to shake themselves free of it again. As time went on, she suffered
strange uncertainties where some of Richard's decisions were concerned.
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