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The Heart of Rachael by Kathleen Thompson Norris
page 218 of 509 (42%)
into the delights of the care-free, radiant hours that lay before
them.

His wife saw the change in him, and rejoiced. But what she did not
see, as the months went on, was the no less marked change in
herself. As Warren's nature expanded, and as he began to reach
quite naturally for the various pleasures all about him, Rachael's
soul experienced an alteration almost directly opposed.

She became thoughtful, almost reserved, she began to show a
certain respect for convention--not for the social conventions at
which she had always laughed, and still laughed, but for the
fundamental laws of truth, simplicity, and cleanness, upon which
the ideal of civilization, at least, is based. She noticed that
she was beginning to like "good" persons, even homely, dowdy, good
persons, like Alice and George Valentine. She lost her old
appetite for scandal, for ugly stories, for reckless speech.

Warren, freed once and for all from his old prejudice, found
nothing troublesome now in the thought that she had been another
man's wife; it was a common situation, it was generally approved.
As in other things, he had had stupidly conventional ideas about
it once--that was all. But Rachael winced at the sound of the word
"divorce," not because of her own divorce, but at the thought that
some other man and woman had promised in their first love what
later they could not fulfil, and hated each other now where they
had loved each other once, at the thought that perhaps--perhaps
one of them loved the other still!

"Divorce is--monstrous," she said soberly to her husband in one of
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