But I am personally not a
man who makes a morbid demand for sympathy--I have little use for
sympathy. I face my troubles alone; I suffer alone," said the Vicar
with an incredible relish. "And then Jack is an independent boy,
and has no taste for being dominated. So that I fear that dear
Maud's most touching efforts hardly fell on very responsive soil.
She felt, I think, the failure of her efforts; and kind as Cousin
Anne is, there is, I think, a certain vagueness of outline about
her mind. I would not call her a fatalist, but she has little
conception of the possibility of moulding character;--it's a rich
mind, but perhaps an indecisive mind? Maud needed a vocation--she
needed an aim. And then, too, you have perhaps observed--or
possibly," said the Vicar gleefully, "she has effaced that
characteristic out of deference to your own great power of amiable
toleration--but she had a certain incisiveness of speech which had
some power to wound? I will give you a small instance. Gibbs, the
schoolmaster, is a very worthy man, but he has a certain
flightiness of manner and disposition. Dear Maud, talking about him
one day at our luncheon-table, said that one read in books how some
people had to struggle with some underlying beast in their
constitution, the voracious man, let us say, with the pig-like
element, the cruel man with the tiger-like quality. 'Mr. Gibbs,'
she said, 'seems to me to be struggling not with a beast, but with
a bird.
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