On that uncouth border of
Western civilization, to which they had both been cast, he was a little
lonely in his way, she in hers; and this fact had drawn them somewhat
together. He was a scholar, she a reader; that too had formed a bond. He had
been much at their home as lover of her niece, and this intimacy had given
her a good chance to take his wearing measure as a man. But over and above
all other things, it was the effect of the unfallen in him, of the highest
keeping itself above assault, of his first youth never yet brushed away as a
bloom, that constituted to her his distinction among the men that she had
known. It served to place him in contrast with the colonial Virginia society
of her remembrance--a society in which even the minds of the clergy were not
like a lawn scentless with the dew on it, but like a lawn parched by the
afternoon sun and full of hot odours. It kept him aloof from the loose ways
of the young backwoodsmen and aristocrats of the town, with whom otherwise
he closely mingled. It gave her the right, she thought, to indulge a
friendship for him such as she had never felt for any other man; and in this
friendship it made it easier for her to overlook a great deal that was rude
in him, headstrong, overbearing.
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