He had never known her to express a regret of the way she had
taken; he had never even surprised her in a perceptible retrospective
dejection; but the conviction remained. Gilbert Penny had been an almost
faultless husband, tender and firm and successful; but his wife had come
from other blood and necessities than domestic felicities; she had been
a part of a super-cultivation, a world of such niceties as the flawless
courtesy of Mr. Winscombe discussing with her the unhappy passion of the
Princess Caroline for Lord Hervey.
Howat Penny thought sombrely of love, of the emotion that had
brought--or betrayed?--Isabel Howat so far away from her birthright. It
had gripped his sister no less tyrannically; stripping them, he
considered, of their essential liberty. The thing was clear enough in
his mind--nothing more than an animal instinct, humiliating to the human
individual, to breed. It was the mere repetition of nature through the
working of an automatic law. No such obscure fate, he determined, should
overtake, obliterate, him. Yet it had involved his mother, a person of
the first superiority. A slight chill, as if a breath of imminent winter
had touched him, communicated itself to his heart.
A trivial conversation was in progress across the table between Mrs.
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