‘I’ve god a horrid gold,’ she said, flattening her consonants in comic imitation of a stage Jew. ‘Dat cubs of falling indo de warder.’ She blew her nose meticulously (as certain modern writers would say), creating an atmosphere which made confession impossible. Mr. Trimblerigg had not a word left that he could utter. Now, that Mr. Trimblerigg should have been puzzled by Davidina’s acquiescence in the story he had told--that he should have been puzzled, that is to say, after perceiving what use she put it to--reveals the irreflective streak which was always dividing him from self-knowledge, and was presently to do him so much more mischief. Holding her tongue had given Davidina a power over him which no exposure of his face-saving art of tale-telling could have equalled. The ignominy of that would have blown over; or he could stoutly have denied the push altogether, declaring it a figment of her imagination; and had she forced him to denial often enough he would have come to believe it true. But by saying nothing Davidina stewed him in his own juice without a bubble to show for it; and the tender mercy of her eyes made him sensitive where the accusation of her tongue would only have hardened him. What Davidina loved was power; and power economically exercised is a far subtler luxury than power which requires repeated effort to sustain it. Davidina by doing nothing had acquired power not material but spiritual; and ‘Thou, Davidina, seest me,’ became more truly the motto of his life day by day. But the reason why Mr. Trimblerigg failed to read her motive while wincing under the results, was partly because power of so static a kind had no attraction for him whatever, and partly because it contradicted the fundamental notion of his whole scheme of life--that he was a man, namely, of virtuous character, one with a destiny of resplendent goodness lying ahead of him. Across that conception of himself Davidina’s contrary conception struck like cataract of the eye. The two views could not co-exist. Without his quite realizing it, Davidina’s reading of his character threatened to drive his own out. In the privacy of his own chamber he had more than once sat down to write his own epitaph--the epitaph which he liked to think would appear on his entablature in that day when Free Churchmen had got the run of Westminster Abbey to burrow in. With the art of simplicity after much trouble he had boiled it down to three words, ‘Little--but good.’ And if that were to represent finally and truthfully his work on earth, what place was there for Davidina’s rival epitaph to stand, if, as he half-suspected, it found its expression in the words, ‘Good--for nothing.’ If I had made him good (and surely I had done that, he thought) was it to be ‘for nothing’ after all? Before he could believe that, he must give up his faith. And when he said ‘faith,’ he never understood that it meant, and meant only, faith in himself.