Again, when Elsmere was an undergraduate Langham and Grey had been intimate. Now, Laugham’s tone _à propos_ of Grey’s politics and Grey’s dreams of Church Reform was as languidly sarcastic as it was with regard to most of the strenuous things of life. ‘Nothing particular is true,’ his manner said, ‘and all action is a degrading _pis-aller_. Get through the day somehow, with as little harm to yourself and other people as may be; do your duty if you like it, but, for heaven’s sake, don’t cant about it to other people!’ If the affinities of character count for much, Catherine and Henry Grey should certainly have understood each other. The tutor liked the look of Elsmere’s wife. His kindly brown eyes rested on her with pleasure; he tried in his shy but friendly way to get at her, and there was in both of them a touch of homeliness, a sheer power of unworldiness that should have drawn them together. And indeed Catherine felt the charm, the spell of this born leader of men. But she watched him with a sort of troubled admiration, puzzled, evidently, by the halo of moral dignity surrounding him, which contended with something else in her mind respecting him. Some words of Robert’s, uttered very early in their acquaintance, had set her on her guard. Speaking of religion, Robert said, ‘Grey is not one of us;’ and Catherine, restrained by a hundred ties of training and temperament, would not surrender herself, and could not if she would. Then had followed their home-coming to the rectory, and the first institution of their common life, never to be forgotten for the tenderness and the sacredness of it. Mrs. Elsmere had received them, and had then retired to a little cottage of her own close by. She had of course already made the acquaintance of her daughter-in-law, for she had been the Thornburghs’ guest for ten days before the marriage in September, and Catherine, moreover, had paid her a short visit in the summer. But it was now that for the first she realized to the full the character of the woman Robert had married. Catherine’s manner to her was sweetness itself. Parted from her own mother as she was, the younger wowan’s strong filial instincts spent themselves in tending the mother who had been the guardian and life of Robert’s youth. And, Mrs. Elsmere in return was awed by Catherine’s moral force and purity of nature, and proud of her personal beauty, which was so real, in spite of the severity of the type, and to which marriage had given, at any rate for the moment, a certain added softness and brilliancy.