If Albert had carried out his great plans, she, as a disinterested spectator, would have written a critical analysis of them much as she would have described a new plant.
But whenever Charlton tried to excite in her an enthusiasm similar to his own, he was completely foiled.

She shrunk from everything like self-denial or labor of any sort.

She was not adapted to it, she assured him.

And he who made fierce war on the uselessness of woman in general came to reconcile himself to the uselessness of woman in particular, to apologize for it, to justify it, to admire it.

Love is the mother of invention, and Charlton persuaded himself that it was quite becoming in such a woman as the most remarkably cultivated, refined, and intellectual Helen Minorkey, to shrink from the drudgery of life.