Rosaleen had, in her long exile, cultivated a demeanour, an expression
which was quite unfathomable by her housemates. She had a sort of meek
and lowly grace, so much the air of the grateful child rescued from
poverty, that it never occurred to them to regard her as anything but
this regulation type. Miss Amy had seen others of the same sort in the
course of her charitable labours. Of course, Rosaleen was grateful, or,
as Miss Amy preferred to put it, appreciative; how could she logically
be anything else? Miss Amy was not aware that in Rosaleen there was no
logic, no reason, and it must be admitted, very little justice. She was
completely composed of feeling. She had a perpetual resentment against
the Humberts which no sense of obligation could assuage. She
passionately preferred her frequently intoxicated and always avaricious
mother; although Miss Amy was undeniably a good woman and her mother was
no more and no less than a human being. Self-interest was absolutely
lacking in Rosaleen. She cared not a whit what you did for her, or could
do for her. She had an inexhaustible fund of devotion, of intense and
absurd affection, but it was not to be bought, it was not even to be
won. She had pity, mercy, compassion beyond measure, but it went only by
favour.
And she had a limitless fortitude. She was not a fighter; she was not
one to struggle for what she desired; her strength was in her terrible
resignation, her fatalistic endurance. She would weep--she was weeping
now--for this probable lover whom she had lost, but there was no
rebellion in her grief. From her very early days she had learned to look
upon life as a sad and ironic affair, from which one could expect
little.
“Ah, that’s the way of the world!” her mother would say, but always of
some disaster.
And it was no doubt the way of the world that this had happened.