She had had moreover, a long experience with males of
the Revercomb stock, and she knew that it was when their blood flowed
quietest that there was the greatest danger of an ultimate "rousing."
All her life she had lived in dread of this menace to respectability--to
that strict observance of the letter of the social law for which the
Hawtreys had stood for generations. On several occasions she had seen
a Revercomb really "roused," and when the transformation was once
achieved, not all the gravity of all the Hawtreys could withstand the
force of it. And this terrible potential energy in her husband's stock
would assert itself, she knew, after a period of tranquillity. She
hadn't been married to a Revercomb for nothing, she had once remarked.
If anything could have put her into a cheerful humour, it would have
been the depressed and solemn manner with which Abel went about the
preparations for his marriage. The inflexible logic of Calvinism had
passed into her fibre, until it had become almost an instinct with her
to tread softly in the way of pleasure lest God should hear. Generations
of joyless ancestors had imbued her with an ineradicable suspicion of
human happiness--as something which must be paid for, either literally
in its pound of flesh, or in a corresponding measure of the materials of
salvation.
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