With the natural and becoming gravity of mature age there mingled a very perceptible strain of melancholy.

You felt it in his laugh, which was seldom hearty; it made his sprightliness in social hours more self-conscious than it might have been.

Beatrice had always felt towards him a very real humility, even when the goading of her unrequited love drove her into a show of scornful opposition.
Herself conscious of but average intelligence, and without studious inclinations, she endowed him with acquisitions as vast as they were vague to her discernment; she knew that it would always lie beyond her power to be his intellectual companion.

Therefore she desired to be before everything womanly in his eyes, to make the note of pure sentiment predominate in their private relations to each other.

She had but won him by her artistic faculty; she could not depend upon that to retain and deepen his affection.