not take a more heavenly way, even from beloved to beloved.

It was the week before marriage, that week when, more than one's whole
life afterward, one's heart feels most longing--most--well, in fact,
it was the week before marriage. From Sunday to Sunday, that was all
the time to be passed. Adorine--women live through this week by
the grace of God, or perhaps they would be as unreasonable as the
men--Adorine could look across the prairie to the little red roof
during the day, and could think across it during the night, and get
up before day to look across again--longing, longing all the time.
Of course one must supply all this from one's own imagination or
experience.

But Adorine could sing, and she sang. One might hear, in a favorable
wind, a gunshot, or the barking of a dog from one place to the other,
so that singing, as to effect, was nothing more than the voicing of
her looking and thinking and longing.

When one loves, it is as if everything was known of and seen by the
other; not only all that passes in the head and heart, which would
in all conscience be more than enough to occupy the other, but the
talking, the dressing, the conduct. It was then that the back hair was
braided and the front curled more and more beautifully every day, and
that the calico dresses became stiffer and stiffer, and the white
crochet lace collar broader and lower in the neck. At thirteen she was
beautiful enough to startle one, they say, but that was nothing; she
spent time and care upon these things, as if, like other women, her
fate seriously depended upon them. There is no self-abnegation like
that of a woman in love.