To go far enough back in accounting for this one would
arrive at the female sort, sterling and arid, that had
presided over his childhood and represented the sex to
his youth, the Aunt Lizzie, widowed and frugal and spare,
who had brought him up; the Janet Wilson, who had washed
and mended him from babyhood, good gaunt creature
half-servant and half-friend--the mature respectable
women and impossible blowsy girls of the Dumfriesshire
village whence he came. With such as these relations,
actual or imagined, could only be of the most practical
kind, matters to be arranged on grounds of expediency,
and certainly not of the first importance. The things of
first importance--what you could do with your energy and
your brains to beat out some microscopic good for the
world, and what you could see and feel and realize in it
of value to yourself--left little room for the feminine
consideration in Finlay's eyes; it was not a thing,
simply, that existed there with any significance. Woman
in her more attractive presentment, was a daughter of
the poets, with an esoteric, or perhaps only a symbolic,
or perhaps a merely decorative function; in any case, a
creature that required an initiation to perceive her--a
process to which Finlay would have been as unwilling as
he was unlikely to submit.
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