She even pushed
the analogy farther, and descried in her step-son's mind a
quaintly-twisted reflection of her husband's. With his
bursts of door-slamming activity, his fits of bookish
indolence, his crude revolutionary dogmatizing and his
flashes of precocious irony, the boy was not unlike a
boisterous embodiment of his father's theories. It was as
though Fraser Leath's ideas, accustomed to hang like
marionettes on their pegs, should suddenly come down and
walk. There were moments, indeed, when Owen's humours must
have suggested to his progenitor the gambols of an infant
Frankenstein; but to Anna they were the voice of her secret
rebellions, and her tenderness to her step-son was partly
based on her severity toward herself. As he had the courage
she had lacked, so she meant him to have the chances she had
missed; and every effort she made for him helped to keep her
own hopes alive.
Her interest in Owen led her to think more often of his
mother, and sometimes she would slip away and stand alone
before her predecessor's portrait. Since her arrival at
Givre the picture--a "full-length" by a once fashionable
artist--had undergone the successive displacements of an
exiled consort removed farther and farther from the throne;
and Anna could not help noting that these stages coincided
with the gradual decline of the artist's fame. She had a
fancy that if his credit had been in the ascendant the first
Mrs.
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