.. a teacher in the local Sunday
school ... one who accepted all the conventions as they were ... who
could not understand anyone not conforming to them ... life was easier
and more comfortable that way....
Spalton's originality and genius would in the end have of itself
produced a rupture between them ... few women are at home with genius,
much as they clasp their hands in ecstasy over it, as viewed on the
lecture and concert platform....
But the wedge that drove them apart was entered when his first wife,
Anne, brought into their married life, Dorothy, a fellow teacher, a
visiting friend.
Dorothy was so thin as to be stringy of body. She had a sharp
hatchet-face, eyes with the colour of ice in them ... a cold, blue-grey.
She was a woman of culture, yet at the same time she was possessed of a
great instinct for organisation and business enterprise--just what was
needed for the kind of thing Spalton was trying to inaugurate at Eos.
She fell in readily with the Master's schemes ... even with his
price-tags on objects of art, his egregious overvaluation of hand
illumined books ... which his wife, with old-fashioned honesty, rebuked
him for.
An affinity of like-mindedness grew up between Spalton and this intense,
homely woman, Dorothy ... whose face, like that of all clever, homely
women, grew to a beauty in his eyes, that mere beauty which plastic form
can never attain.
Pages:
313
314
315
316
317
318
319
320
321
322
323
324
325
326
327
328
329
330
331
332
333
334
335
336
337