“She sent forth her flights of stories in elucidation of the hidden; and they were like white bird after bird winging to covert beneath a thundercloud; until her breast ached for the voice of the thunder: harsh facts: sure as she was of never losing her filial hold of the beloved.” When Rose determined to appeal their case to her mother, she said to Evan,--[424] “You know she is called a philosopher; nobody knows how deep-hearted she is, though. My mother is true as steel. * * * When I say kindness, I don’t mean any ‘Oh, my child,’ and tears and kisses and maundering, you know. You mustn’t mind her thinking me a little fool.” Then there is the sisterly attachment between Rhoda and Dahlia Fleming that leads Rhoda’s puritanic nature into a dictatorial fanaticism as disastrous in its results as Sir Austin’s; there is friendship masculine between Beauchamp and Dr. Shrapnel; and friendship feminine between Lady Dunstane and Diana. It is not that Meredith has a monopoly on the portrayal of human affection. Lytton has to his credit the Chillinglys[425] and the Caxtons; Gaskell has the Gibsons; Dickens, Amy Dorrit, and Joe Gargary; Brontë, Caroline Helstone and her mother; Trollope, Lily Dale and hers; in Barry Lyndon, Thackeray gives us a base soul redeemed by love for a child, and in Colonel Newcome, Helen Pendennis, and Amelia Osborne, he presents a rather one-sided devotion, as does Eliot in Mrs. Transome,--though the latter does not feel called upon to exclaim, “By Heaven, it is pitiful, the bootless love of women for children in Vanity Fair!” But it is true that Meredith through the richness of his well-rounded nature was more able than the others to lift emotion fearlessly to a height of intensity, preserved there from any danger of a fall into bathos, because supported by intellect on the one hand and humor on the other.