Of
anything approaching either coquetry or prudery she is incapable. The
utter absence of all self-consciousness, whether of external beauty or
inward loveliness; the ethereal purity, the childlike trustfulness, the
instinctive recognition of all that is true and earnest and high in
Ladislaw, through all the surface appearance of indecision, of vague
uncertain aim and purpose and limited object in life; no thought of what
is ordinarily called love toward him, of love on his part toward her--ever
dawns upon her guileless innocence. Through all her yearning to do
justice to him as regards the property of her dead husband, which she
looks upon as fairly and justly his, or at least to be shared with him,
there arises before her the determination of her dead husband that it
should not be so; and her sweet regretful pitifulness over that meagre
wasted life prevails. Anon, when at last through the will she is made
aware of the crowning act of that concentrated callousness of heart and
soul, and of the true nature of the benumbing grasp it had sought to lay
on her for life, and had so far succeeded in doing, then for the first
time her "tremulous" maiden purity and simplicity awakens, and for the
first time it enters her mind that Ladislaw could, under any
circumstances, become her lover; that another had thought of them in that
light, and that he himself had been conscious of such a possibility
arising.
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