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When he spoke the voice came heavy and vibrant from the great chest, a harsh, deep bass, a voice in which to command men, not a voice in which to talk to women. Lloyd, long schooled to self-repression and the control of her emotions when such repression and control were necessary, sat absolutely moveless on her high seat, her hands only shutting tighter and tighter upon the reins.
But in this home of self-repression and retrospection, it was a life-story. The eyes had gone their way, doubtless forgetting the little sister they pitied; but the little sister? The days glided into weeks, the weeks into months.
It is good to know that this habitual repression comes, in many cases, from want of knowledge of the fact that self-repression is not self-control. But the reader may say, "what am I to do, if I feel angry, and want to hit a man in the face; I am not supposed to hit him am I, rather than to repress my feelings?"
He wondered if the silent, calm-faced, self-contained woman beside him could be the laughing, joyous maiden whom he had seen flitting among the trees and fountains at their first meeting little more than three months past. He recalled how he had then thought her unlike either her father or her aunt, and believed her to be wholly without their self-restraint and self-repression.
A sort of surcharged, mesmeric property seemed to hold him at such times, and he would wonder whether the hideous experiences and iron self-repression which he had passed through of late had not begun, unknown to himself, actually to affect his brain. Now during the heat of the midday halt, he would withdraw and sit alone by the hour, contemplating the metal box, and at times its contents.
My guest, after a brief effort at self-repression, fell upon the food in a fashion that told me a far more vivid tale of his present circumstances than the most lengthy explanation could have done. When he was full I gave him a cigar, and he leaned back in his padded arm-chair and surveyed me with the nearest approach to emotion that I have ever observed in the countenance of a Scot.
Then he struck the pavement with his cane, for it irritated him to be so completely surprised. Wade knew! How much did he know? And how in under the sun ? "Pyed!" he grunted. "Devil take the man!" He turned slowly and entered the building to his night's work. For many years self-repression had stood high in the estimation of Hughey Podmore as a thing worth cultivating.
When one once acknowledges that she was not a common woman, then all this is easily understood. She was abominable but she was not common. She had suffered in her life not from its constant inferiority but from constant self-repression. A common woman finding herself placed in a commanding position might have formed the design to become the second Mrs. de Barral.
Catherine! For Rose, what a multitude of associations clustered round the name! To her it meant everything at this moment against which her soul rebelled the most scrupulous order, the most rigid self-repression, the most determined sacrificing of 'this warm kind world, with all its indefensible delights, to a cold other-world, with its torturing, inadmissible claims.
Men who have attained self-repression are occasionally open to a perilous onrush of feeling. Believing that they know themselves, they walk boldly forward towards the high-road and the pitfall alike. These had been Loder's disconnected ideas and speculations on the first day of his new life.
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