"There is not an acrobat in Barnum's circus," he said, "who could have turned a somersault as neatly. I could not have believed our Susan capable of so sudden a change of front. A woman of her talent and resource is hid away and completely lost in a small place like Jones's Landing."
Rose agreed with him, and was vastly interested in the whole affair. She dwelt on it, recurred to the different points and stages, discussed, analysed, and combed out every detail separately to its greatest length. It gratified Joseph that she should concern herself so warmly in his family affairs, but he would have been glad if her interest had been sooner satisfied. She contrived that the conversation should not progress, as it naturally would have done, from Margaret's love-passages to their own. Even the night on Fessenden's Island was not able, as Joseph had felt confident that it would be, to withdraw her thoughts from the runaways to their own tender affairs. When he endeavoured to transfer the interest, she returned with renewed curiosity to ask where Margaret and Blount first met, and from that digressed still further, to demand full particulars of his circumstances, birth, and parentage. She was as charmingly companionable as she always had been; Joseph loved and adored as he always did; but he could not draw her on to the closer and more personal topic on which he yearned to hold converse.
That topic--their engagement--was one to which this afternoon she had an insuperable, and, as she told herself, an unreasonable repugnance to reopen at the present moment. Come it must, eventually, and she would welcome it; but not to-day. A shadow was upon her, the shadow of Bertie Roe, an influence to which she was resolved that she would not yield, but which yet had power to cast an unattractiveness and dimness over all beside. She had broken with that man for ever, had she not? but she had spoken with him, in dismissing him, and the converse of all the world beside had lost its relish. She felt, but would not own it. Had she not announced openly her new engagement? and was she, like some poor-spirited slave, to break it off and go back, because her old tyrant had chosen to lift his finger? What would her friends, the world, the free-thinking and strong-minded who had applauded her spirit, say to see her go back to bondage and resume her chains? She chafed to think of it, and tried to lash herself into new anger against her husband. And she had felt so strong in her resolve, all through the bygone week! To think that a few words, and a little pleading, should have weakened her like this! She was growing unworthy of her former self. How dim and indistinct her wrongs had grown since yesterday, when that sweet insidious voice had taken on itself to explain them away! Why had she listened?... And until yesterday, the sight of the woman he was always walking with had made her strong; but that crouching figure under the tree, seen yesterday, who could fear that? How feel jealous of aught so forlorn? There was a little triumph in it, that Bertie should have been brought so low; but she missed the tonic and strengthening influence which had been thus dispelled. She was resolved to resist, to have done with Bertie Roe; but there was a strange diffidence of the strength within her, which she would not acknowledge to herself, but still was aware of, foreboding general collapse.