She thought of the three handsome, happy,
highly-endowed young men, and of the brilliant future she had foreseen
for each of them: her husband at the Bar, her brother in the Church,
and Vellan--not in politics, she could never understand his political
aspirations, they seemed quite at odds with the rest of his
character--but in literature, as a poet, for he wrote verse which she
considered very unusual and pleasing. She thought of this, and then
she remembered that her husband was dead, that her brother was dead,
and that Theodore Vellan had been dead to his world, at all events,
for thirty years. Not one of them had in any way distinguished
himself; not one had in any measure fulfilled the promise of his
youth.
Her memories were sweet and bitter; they made her heart glow and ache.
Vellan, as she recalled him, had been, before all things, gentle. He
was witty, he had humour, he had imagination; but he was, before all
things, gentle--with the gentlest voice, the gentlest eyes, the
gentlest manners. His gentleness, she told herself, was the chief
element of his charm--his gentleness, which was really a phase of his
modesty. 'He was very gentle, he was very modest, he was very graceful
and kind,' she said; and she remembered a hundred instances of his
gentleness, his modesty, his kindness.
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