But the recollection of what had passed with Mr. Peck remained a reproach
in her mind, and nothing that she accomplished for the Social Union with
the other ministers was important. In her vivid reveries she often met him,
and combated his peculiar ideas, while she admitted a wrong in her own
position, and made every expression of regret, and parted from him on the
best terms, esteemed and complimented in high degree; in reality she saw
him seldom, and still more rarely spoke to him, and then with a distance
and consciousness altogether different from the effects dramatised in her
fancy. Sometimes during the period of her interest in the sick children of
the hands, she saw him in their houses, or coming and going outside; but
she had no chance to speak with him, or else said to herself that she had
none, because she was ashamed before him. She thought he avoided her;
but this was probably only a phase of the impersonality which seemed
characteristic of him in everything. At these times she felt a strange
pathos in the lonely man whom she knew to be at odds with many of his own
people, and she longed to interpret herself more sympathetically to him,
but actually confronted with him she was sensible of something cold and
even hard in the nimbus her compassion cast about him. Yet even this added
to the mystery that piqued her, and that loosed her fancy to play, as soon
as they parted, in conjecture about his past life, his marriage, and the
mad wife who had left him with the child he seemed so ill-fitted to care
for. Then, the next time they met she was abashed with the recollection of
having unwarrantably romanced the plain, simple, homely little man, and she
added an embarrassment of her own to that shyness of his which kept them
apart.