bustling family. Perhaps she did not seek it--perhaps she dared not.
Anyhow, during the month that had been occupied with her marriage
preparations, she had scarcely been ten minutes alone, not even at
night, for two children shared her room--the loving little things whom
she had taught for two years, first as daily, and then as resident
governess, and to whom she had persisted in giving lessons till the last.

She stood with the same fixed composedness--not composure--of
manner; the quietness of a person who, having certain things to go
through, goes through them in a sort of dream, almost without
recognizing her own identity. Women, more than men, are subject to
this strange, somnambulistic, mental condition, the result of strong
emotion, in which they both do and endure to an extent that men would
never think of or find possible.

After a minute she moved slightly, took up and laid down a book, but
still mechanically, as if she did not quite know what she was doing
until, suddenly, she caught sight of her wedding-ring. She regarded it
with something very like affright; tried convulsively to pull it off;
but it was rather tight; and before it had passed a finger-joint she
had recollected herself and pressed it down again.

"It is too late now. He is so good--every body says so--and he is so
very good to me."

She spoke aloud, though she was alone in the room, or rather because
she was alone, after a habit which, like all solitarily reared and dreamy
persons, Christian had had all her life--her young, short life--only
twenty-one years--and yet it seemed to her a whole, long, weary
existence.