No man, not even in the last extremity, could have loved a woman as ugly as Judge Crowborough was.

The roughest man would have had sufficient esthetic sense to have been shocked into revolt; yet a woman, a refined and intelligent woman, had married the judge and survived it.

She appeared now, not only expressionless and unrevolted, but filled with a healthy zest for social reforms and the spiritual welfare of girl orphans.
"Well, I've learned something of life to-night," thought Gabriella while she watched her.
Later in the evening, when she passed into the drawing-room, with Mrs.
Crowborough, bleak, unbending, and trailing her chains of jet, she comforted herself again with the reflection that what she was "seeing" might not be particularly exciting, "but it was life." On a short, hard sofa near the fire, beside Fatty, who bloomed like a white rose under the red-shaded light, she listened to Mrs.Fowler's unflagging efforts to "get on" with the judge's wife.

Never had the dauntless little woman revealed more surprising resourcefulness, never had she talked so vivaciously, never had she appeared so relentlessly pleasant.

It was as if she said in the face of Mrs.Crowborough's insensibility, which was the insensibility not of mind, but of inanimate matter, "Whatever you do, you can't keep me from being sweet." And in this strained sweetness there was something touching, something wistful, a hint of inner weariness which showed now and then beneath the restless vivacity.
"Isn't it funny," said Patty suddenly, "how much mamma cares about things that don't matter at all?
You wouldn't believe it to look at her, but she is in her heart the most worldly one of the family.