invulnerable as soon as she became Mrs. Carruthers
of Poynings. And, under all the cold
placid exterior which never thawed, under all
the set Grandisonian forms of speech which
were never relaxed, under the judicial manner
and the Board of Guardians address, flowed
a warm current of love for his wife which he
himself scarcely suspected. With such poor
brains as he had, he had occasionally fallen to
the task of self-examination, asking himself how
it was that he, Mr. Carruthers of Poynings (even
in his thoughts he liked the ring of that phrase),
could have so far permitted himself to be
swayed by any one, and then he told himself that
he was reverenced and looked up to, that his
state, position, and dignities were duly acknowledged,
and in a satisfied frame of mind he
closed the self-colloquy. Loved his wife—eh!
neither he nor any one else knew how much.
George Dallas need not have been anxious
about the treatment of his mother by his step-
father. When the young man cursed his exile
from his mother's presence and his step-father's
home, he little knew the actual motives which
prompted Mr. Carruthers to decide upon and
to keep rigidly in force that decree of banishment.
Not only his step-son's wildness and extravagance:
though a purist, Mr. Carruthers was sufficient
man of the world to know that in most
cases there are errors of youth which correct
themselves in the flight of time. Not a lurking
fear that his niece, thrown in this prodigal's way,
should be dazzled by the glare of his specious
gifts, and singe her youth and innocence in their
baleful light. Not a dread of having to notice
and recognise the young man as his connexion
in the chastened arena of county society.

As nature had not endowed Mr. Carruthers
with a capacity for winning affection, though it
was not to be denied that there were qualities
in his character which commanded respect,
it was fortunate for him that he cared less about
the former than the latter. Nevertheless, he
would probably have been rendered very uncomfortable,
not to say unhappy, had he supposed
that his wife, "Mrs. Carruthers of Poynings,"
as there is reason to suppose he designated her,
even in his inmost thoughts, positively did not
love him. Such a supposition, however, never
had occurred to him, which was fortunate; for
Mr. Carruthers was apt to hold by his suppositions
as strongly as other people held by
their convictions, as, indeed, being his, why
should he not? and it would have been very
difficult to dislodge such a notion. The notion
itself would have been, in the first place, untrue,
and in the second dangerous. Mrs. Carruthers
of Poynings loved her rather grim and decidedly
uninteresting but unimpeachably respectable
husband, if not passionately, which was hardly
to be expected, very sincerely, and estimated him
after the fashion of wives—that is to say,
considerably above his deserts. All women like their
husbands, except those who notoriously do not,
and Mrs. Carruthers was no exception to the
rule. She had a much greater sense of justice
in her than most women, and she used it practically
—applied it to her own case. She knew the
fault had been her son's in the great sorrow
which had destroyed all the pride and pleasure
which her prosperous marriage would otherwise
have brought her, and she did not charge it upon
her husband, or, except in so far as her
unconquerable anxiety and depression caused him
annoyance, did she inflict the penalty of it on him.
She knew him to be a hard man, and she did not
look for softness from him; but she accepted such
advantages as hardness of character possesses,
and bore its disadvantages well. "If I were
he," she had said to herself, even in the first
hours of her anguish of conviction of her boy's
unworthiness, and when his step-father's edict
of exclusion was but newly published, "and I
had so little knowledge of human nature as he
has, if life had never taught me toleration, if
Clare were my niece, and George his son, would
I not have acted as he has done? He is consistent
to the justness and the sternness of his character."
Thinking thus, Mrs. Carruthers acted
on the maxim that to judge others aright we
should put ourselves in their position. So she
accepted the great trial of her life, and suffered
it as quietly and patiently as she could. It
would be difficult to define with precision the
nature of Mr. Carruthers's sentiments towards
George Dallas. The young man had met his
step-father but rarely, and had on each occasion
increased the disfavour with which from the first
the elder man had regarded him. He had never
tried to propitiate, had, indeed, regarded him
with contemptuous indifference, secure in what
he fancied to be the security of his mother's
position; and there had been covert antagonism
between them from the first. How much
astonished Mr. Carruthers would have been had any
revelation been made to him of the secrets of his
own heart, whereby he would have discovered
that a strong sentiment of jealousy lay at the
root of his antipathy to George Dallas—jealousy
which intensified his hardness and sternness, and
forbade him to listen to the promptings of common
sense, which told him that the line he was
taking towards the son was so cruel to the
mother as to neutralise all the advantages
presented by the fine marriage she had made, and
for which, by the way, he expected her to be
constantly demonstratively grateful. In this
expectation he was as constantly disappointed.
Mrs. Carruthers was an eminently true woman,
and as she felt no peculiar exuberance of gratitude,
she showed none. She was a lady, too—
much more perfectly a lady than Mr. Carruthers
was unimpeachably a gentleman—and, as such,
she filled her position as a matter of course, as
she would have filled one much higher, or one
much lower, and thought nothing about it. She
was of so much finer a texture, so much higher
a nature than her husband, that she did not
suspect him of any double motive in his treatment
of George Dallas. She never dreamed that