And the
beauty would think with herself that such a middle-aged gentleman did not
admire pretty girls, and was severe and unkind and puritanical; whereas it
was the lack of beauty that made him turn away; the disappointment of a
face--dull, that ought to be radiant; or the presence of only that sort of
beauty, which in middle age, except the deeper nature should meantime come
into play, would be worse than common-place--would be mingled with the
trail of more or less guilty sensuality. Many a woman at forty is
repulsive, whom common men found at twenty irresistibly attractive; and
many a woman at seventy is lovely to the eyes of the man who would have
been compelled to allow that she was decidedly plain at seventeen.
"Maidens' bairns are aye weel guided," says the Scotch proverb; and the
same may be said of bachelors' wives. So I will cease the strain, and
return to Adela, the change in whom first roused it.
Of late, I had seen a glimmer of something in her countenance which I had
never seen before--a something which, the first time I perceived it, made
me say to her, in my own hearing only: "Ah, my dear, we shall understand
each other by and by!" And now and then the light in her eye would be
dimmed as by the fore-shadowing of a tear, when there was no immediate and
visible cause to account for it; and--which was very strange--I could not
help fancying she began to be a little shy of her old uncle.
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