Mrs.Rance at least controlled practically each other license of the present and the near future: the license to pass the hour as he would have found convenient; the license to stop remembering, for a little, that, though if proposed to--and not only by this aspirant but by any other--he wouldn't prove foolish, the proof of wisdom was none the less, in such a fashion, rather cruelly conditioned; the license in especial to proceed from his letters to his journals and insulate, orientate, himself afresh by the sound, over his gained interval, of the many-mouthed monster the exercise of whose lungs he so constantly stimulated.

Mrs.Rance remained with him till the others came back from church, and it was by that time clearer than ever that his ordeal, when it should arrive, would be really most unpleasant.

His impression--this was the point--took somehow the form not so much of her wanting to press home her own advantage as of her building better than she knew; that is of her symbolising, with virtual unconsciousness, his own special deficiency, his unfortunate lack of a wife to whom applications could be referred.

The applications, the contingencies with which Mrs.Rance struck him as potentially bristling, were not of a sort, really, to be met by one's self.

And the possibility of them, when his visitor said, or as good as said, "I'm restrained, you see, because of Mr.Rance, and also because I'm proud and refined; but if it WASN'T for Mr.Rance and for my refinement and my pride!"-- the possibility of them, I say, turned to a great murmurous rustle, of a volume to fill the future; a rustle of petticoats, of scented, many-paged letters, of voices as to which, distinguish themselves as they might from each other, it mattered little in what part of the resounding country they had learned to make themselves prevail.