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- vicarious reception of them. She was vividly aware how immense was that
influence, which, even in the closest ties of the heart, the merest
appearances make upon the mind. And as in the admiring love and
graceful devotion of Pierre lay now her highest joy in life; so she
omitted no slightest trifle which could possibly contribute to the
preservation of so sweet and flattering a thing.
Besides all this, Mary Glendinning was a woman, and with more than the
ordinary vanity of women--if vanity it can be called--which in a life of
nearly fifty years had never betrayed her into a single published
impropriety, or caused her one known pang at the heart. Moreover, she
had never yearned for admiration; because that was her birthright by the
eternal privilege of beauty; she had always possessed it; she had not to
turn her head for it, since spontaneously it always encompassed her.
Vanity, which in so many women approaches to a spiritual vice, and
therefore to a visible blemish; in her peculiar case--and though
possessed in a transcendent degree--was still the token of the highest
health; inasmuch as never knowing what it was to yearn for its
gratification, she was almost entirely unconscious of possessing it at
all. Many women carry this light of their lives flaming on their
foreheads; but Mary Glendinning unknowingly bore hers within. Through
all the infinite traceries of feminine art, she evenly glowed like a
vase which, internally illuminated, gives no outward sign of the
lighting flame, but seems to shine by the very virtue of the exquisite
marble itself. But that bluff corporeal admiration, with which some
ball-room women are content, was no admiration to the mother of Pierre.
Not the general homage of men, but the selected homage of the noblest
men, was what she felt to be her appropriate right. And as her own
maternal partialities were added to, and glorified the rare and absolute
merits of Pierre; she considered the voluntary allegiance of his
affectionate soul, the representative fealty of the choicest guild of
his race. Thus, though replenished through all her veins with the
subtlest vanity, with the homage of Pierre alone she was content.
But as to a woman of sense and spirit, the admiration of even the
noblest and most gifted man, is esteemed as nothing, so long as she
remains conscious of possessing no directly influencing and practical
sorcery over his soul; and as notwithstanding all his intellectual
superiority to his mother, Pierre, through the unavoidable weakness of
inexperienced and unexpanded youth, was strangely docile to the maternal
tuitions in nearly all the things which thus far had any ways interested
or affected him; therefore it was, that to Mary Glendinning this
reverence of Pierre was invested with all the proudest delights and
witcheries of self-complacency, which it is possible for the most
conquering virgin to feel. Still more. That nameless and infinitely
delicate aroma of inexpressible tenderness and attentiveness which, in
every refined and honorable attachment, is cotemporary with the
courtship, and precedes the final banns and the rite; but which, like
the _bouquet_ of the costliest German wines, too often evaporates upon
pouring love out to drink, in the disenchanting glasses of the
matrimonial days and nights; this highest and airiest thing in the whole
compass of the experience of our mortal life; this heavenly
evanescence--still further etherealized in the filial breast--was for
Mary Glendinning, now not very far from her grand climacteric,
miraculously revived in the courteous lover-like adoration of Pierre.
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