She marvelled at his extraordinary power of detachment. Did matters merely mundane ever impress him? Did anything, humanly speaking, ever put him out, except in so far as it interfered with his work? Was he literally, as he used to say himself, only a registering machine of effects and views, pledged to render an actual transcript of Nature, seen, as is the condition of all art, through a temperament, but a temperament merely receptive, limpid, clear, and untroubled by the waves of passionate human yearnings and desires? There was actually something of what Browning calls the “terrible composure” of Nature about him, she thought, a patient, broad-minded, magnificent way of regarding things entailed by a continual contemplation of her vastness, her implacabilities, her unconscious cruelties and brutalities. She never could forget Rivers’ behaviour in a thunderstorm that overtook them one Sunday afternoon by Scargill Tower. Out came the sketch book, quick as the lightning that seemed to flicker in its horribly malicious way down by the stone wall that edged the road they were walking along. “I must have that!” he murmured. “By Jove!” He actually stopped, and stood still on the white road among the falling thunderbolts, as it seemed to her. She stopped too and opened her puny umbrella, trying to ward off some of the heavy rain-drops from the leaves of the sketch book. It never even seemed to occur to the artist that she might be afraid, or wet. She was not afraid, such was the contagion of his courage, but she was wet through. The rain splashed on his paper in spite of her efforts, and blended together colours that the artist hastily cast on, into shapes unexpected by him, but still a memorandum of the breathing light and steam of mist over there by Cotherstone, where the storm that oppressed them now was passing off, had been secured. It was quite worth her while; she had the satisfaction of knowing that Rivers could not think her a coward. He did not tell her so, but took her pluck and superiority to feminine weakness as a matter of course. She was driven to try and please him by the achievement of new virtues, entirely foreign to her nature. She laughed, sometimes, when she thought of herself, the leader of what there was of advanced literary thought in Newcastle--the lady who could discuss the higher ethics, and expound the morbidities of Amiel and Meredith to a select cultured circle,--being forced to recommend herself to the man she loved by a display of mere physical courage, and even manual dexterity. Yes, she found she could really please Rivers best by attending to his bridge for him.