Waiting for Clarity — North and South

Margaret is in London with something missing that she cannot quite name. The household is comfortable, Aunt Shaw is kind, Edith is cheerful, and Henry Lennox has begun to be a regular presence, finding reasons to visit and occupying himself with Margaret's financial affairs following Bell's death. His attention is professional in form and more personal in feeling; the chapter notes that he listens to her opinion with a deference that is reluctant and carefully concealed, which makes it the more genuine. Nothing resolves in this chapter. Margaret waits, in the condition that Barrett Browning's epigraph names: experience holding its dulcimer of patience and playing harmonies that cannot yet be understood. She is being formed, still, by what she has been through, and the formation requires the particular discipline of not forcing a conclusion before it is ready to arrive. The chapter is titled 'Something Wanting,' and it maintains that title's condition throughout: the something is present as an absence, felt but not named, and the patience required to hold it without naming it is the chapter's governing quality.