They loved her with an unjaded love—as they love her memory to this day. They throve in her as they throve in the climate of moor and sea. What she felt for them I could not determine. Unless there be a kind of love that can exist without a breath of tenderness, it was not love. It was too passionate for affection. It had nothing in common with the wistful doting of old age. It had a quality, at once abstract and practical, that made it seem like some deeply felt bargain, as though, perhaps, she accepted them as the remission of her own tragedy, an indulgence of a maternal feeling that in her own maternity had been deformed by constant blasts of fate, as the thorn trees on the moor were warped by the wind from the sea. But she never made any move to take them from me or set them against me. Circumstances—my loneliness, my poverty, my husband’s perplexing injunction that his children should grow up at Roses—all made it easy for her to avenge herself on me for a marriage she had disapproved; but, having brought herself to swallow me, she had, it appeared, no further wish than to make a good digestion of me.30

Once only did I see her exhibit an unequivocal force of feeling, and the exhibition left me baffled as ever as to the nature of the feeling itself. There were vipers on the moor, and Job had taught the children how to handle them safely, since it was too much to expect that they would not handle them at all. The length of a viper lashing below the small brown fist that held it firmly just beneath the head, the smell of the viaticum chloroform on the wad of cotton-wool, and, later, the stink of a dissection, had become familiar to me, and not even very alarming. But on this occasion Paul’s hand was still greasy from helping to lubricate the Daimler. The viper writhed out of his grasp, fell at Caroline’s bare feet, and bit her in the toe. For several days she was dangerously ill. During that time I had a horrible leisure in which to observe my mother-in-law. Under her reserve I saw a wild-cat fury at this misadventure, a rage so intense that I was afraid to leave Paul in the same room with her, for it seemed possible that in some self-contained trance of resentment she would turn and rend him to pieces. Her anxiety appeared to have carried her beyond the fact of a child in danger of dying; it was harsh and abstracted, akin to the anxiety of the speculator who has staked everything, future as well as fortune, on a coup and sees the market wavering against him; and when the doctor pronounced Caroline out of danger, she gave vent to a shuddering, astonished ‘Whew-w!’ as though it were she herself who had escaped a mortal peril.