What would
Walter Hartright have said in this emergency? Poor, dear
Hartright! I am beginning to feel the want of his honest advice
and his willing help already.
Surely I heard something. Was it a bustle of footsteps below
stairs? Yes! I hear the horses' feet--I hear the rolling wheels----
II
June 15th.--The confusion of their arrival has had time to
subside. Two days have elapsed since the return of the
travellers, and that interval has sufficed to put the new
machinery of our lives at Blackwater Park in fair working order.
I may now return to my journal, with some little chance of being
able to continue the entries in it as collectedly as usual.
I think I must begin by putting down an odd remark which has
suggested itself to me since Laura came back.
When two members of a family or two intimate friends are
separated, and one goes abroad and one remains at home, the return
of the relative or friend who has been travelling always seems to
place the relative or friend who has been staying at home at a
painful disadvantage when the two first meet. The sudden
encounter of the new thoughts and new habits eagerly gained in the
one case, with the old thoughts and old habits passively preserved
in the other, seems at first to part the sympathies of the most
loving relatives and the fondest friends, and to set a sudden
strangeness, unexpected by both and uncontrollable by both,
between them on either side.
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