It seemed to her husband that it was both unreasonable¹ and ungrateful of her to become a tearful young woman after their union, and for a phase of some months she certainly was a tearful young woman, but his mother made it clear to him that this was quite a correct and permissible² phase for her, as she was, and so he expressed his impatience³ with temperance, and presently she was able to pull herself together and begin to readjust herself to a universe that had seemed for a time almost too shattered for endurance. She resumed the process of growing up that her marriage had for a time so vividly⁴ interrupted, and if her schooldays were truncated⁵ and the college phase omitted, she had at any rate a very considerable amount of fundamental experience to replace these now customary completions.  
Three little girls she brought into the world in the first three years of her married life, then after a brief interval⁶ of indifferent health she had a fourth girl baby of a physique quite obviously inferior to its predecessors⁷, and then, after—and perhaps as a consequence of—much whispered conversation of the two mothers-in-law, protests and tactful explanation on the part of the elderly and trustworthy family doctor and remarks of an extraordinary breadth (and made at table too, almost before the door had closed on Snagsby!) from Ellen's elder sister, there came a less reproductive phase....
 
But by that time Lady Harman had acquired the habit of reading and the habit of thinking over what she read, and from that it is an easy step to thinking over oneself and the circumstances of one's own life. The one thing trains for the other.
 
Now the chief circumstance in the life of Lady Harman was Sir Isaac. Indeed as she grew to a clear consciousness of herself and her position, it seemed to her he was not so much a circumstance as a circumvallation. There wasn't a direction in which she could turn without immediately running up against him. He had taken possession of her extremely. And from her first resignation to this as an inevitable⁹ fact she had come, she hardly knew how, to a renewed disposition¹⁰ to regard this large and various universe beyond him and outside of him, with something of the same slight adventurousness¹¹ she had felt before he so comprehensively happened to her. After her first phase of despair she had really done her best to honour the bargain she had rather unwittingly made and to love and to devote herself and be a loyal and happy wife to this clutching, hard-breathing little man who had got her, and it was the insatiable excesses of his demands quite as much as any outer influence that made her realize the impossibility of such a concentration.
 
His was a supremely¹² acquisitive and possessive character, so that he insulted her utmost subjugations by an obtrusive¹³ suspicion and jealousy¹⁴, he was jealous of her childish worship of her dead father, jealous of her disposition to go to church, jealous of the poet Wordsworth because she liked to read his sonnets¹⁵, jealous because she loved great music, jealous when she wanted to go out; if she seemed passionless and she seemed more and more passionless he was jealous, and the slightest gleam of any warmth of temperament¹⁶ filled him with a vile¹⁷ and furious dread¹⁸ of dishonouring¹⁹ possibilities. And the utmost resolution to believe in him could not hide from her for ever the fact that his love manifested itself almost wholly as a parade of ownership and a desire, without kindliness²⁰, without any self-forgetfulness. All his devotion, his self-abjection, had been the mere²¹ qualms²² of a craving²³, the flush of eager courtship. Do as she would to overcome these realizations²⁴, forces within her stronger than herself, primordial²⁵ forces with the welfare of all life in their keeping, cried out upon the meanness of his face, the ugly pointed²⁶ nose and the thin compressed lips, the weak neck, the clammy hands, the ungainly nervous gestures, the tuneless whistling between the clenched²⁷ teeth. He would not let her forget a single detail. Whenever she tried to look at any created thing, he thrust himself, like one of his own open-air advertisements, athwart the attraction.
 
As she grew up to an achieved womanhood—and it was even a physical growing-up, for she added more than an inch of stature²⁸ after her marriage—her life became more and more consciously like a fencing match in which her vision flashed over his head and under his arms and this side of him and that, while with a toiling²⁹ industry he fought to intercept³⁰ it. And from the complete acceptance of her matrimonial submission³¹, she passed on by almost insensible degrees towards a conception of her life as a struggle, that seemed at first entirely³² lonely and unsupported, to exist—against him.
 
In every novel as in every picture there must be an immense simplification, and so I tell the story of Lady Harman's changing attitude without any of those tangled³³ leapings-forward or harkings-back, those moods and counter moods and relapses which made up the necessary course of her mind. But sometimes she was here and sometimes she was there, sometimes quite back to the beginning an obedient, scrupulously³⁴ loyal and up-looking young wife, sometimes a wife concealing³⁵ the humiliation³⁶ of an unhappy choice in a spurious satisfaction and affection. And mixed up with widening spaces of criticism and dissatisfaction and hostility³⁷ there were, you must understand, moments of real liking³⁸ for this outrageous³⁹ little man and streaks⁴⁰ of an absurd maternal⁴¹ tenderness for him. They had been too close together to avoid that. She had a woman's affection of ownership too, and disliked to see him despised or bettered or untidy; even those ridiculous muddy hands had given her a twinge of solicitude⁴²....
 
And all the while she was trying to see the universe also, the great background of their two little lives, and to think what it might mean for her over and above their too obliterating⁴³ relationship.
 
6
It would be like counting the bacteria of an infection to trace how ideas of insubordination came drifting into Sir Isaac's Paradise. The epidemic⁴⁴ is in the air. There is no Tempter nowadays, no definitive⁴⁵ apple. The disturbing force has grown subtler, blows in now like a draught⁴⁶, creeps and gathers like the dust,—a disseminated⁴⁷ serpent. Sir Isaac brought home his youn............