RODERICK HUDSON
was she in short consenting to that, to humiliation? Rowland looked at the question rather than asked it, since everything hung for him on her possible appetite for sacrifice, on his measure, so to call it, of what she would abjectly "take." Was she one of those who would be abject for some last scrap of the feast of their dream? It wronged her, as he liked to think of her, to believe either that she was or that she was n't, and, as if the matter were none of his business, he tried to turn away his head. There are women whose love is care-taking and patronising and who attach themselves to those persons of the other sex in whom the manly grain is soft and submissive. It did not in the least please him to hold her one of these, for he regarded such women as mere males in petticoats, and he was convinced that this young lady was intensely of her sex. That she was a very different person from Christina Light did n't at all prove that she was a less considerable one, and if the Princess Casamassima had gone up into a high place to publish her dismissal of a man who could n't strike out like a man, it had been hitherto presumable that she was not of a complexion to put up at any point with what might be called the Princess's leavings. It was Christina's constant practice to remind you of the complexity of her character, of the subtlety of her mind, of her troublous faculty of seeing everything in a dozen different lights. Mary had never pretended not to be simple; but Rowland had a theory that she had really a finer sense of human things and had made more, for observation and for temper, of her scant material
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