" As the mother,
so the wife. She said to herself now in sad paraphrase, "And though he
loves me little, yet he is my husband, and for what he is it may be that
I am in some sense responsible." Yet he is my husband! All that it was
came to her; the closed door, the drawn blinds; the intimacy which shut
them away from all the world; the things said which can only be said
without desecration between two honest souls who love each other; and
that sweet isolation which makes marriage a separate world, with its own
sacred revelation. This she had known; this had been; and though the
image of the sacred thing had been defaced, yet the shrine was not
destroyed.
For she believed that each had kept the letter of the law; that, whatever
his faults, he had turned his face to no other woman. If she had not
made his heart captive and drawn him by an ever-shortening cord of
attraction, yet she was sure that none other had any influence over him,
that, as he had looked at her in those short-lived days of his first
devotion, he looked at no other. The way was clear yet. There was
nothing irretrievable, nothing irrevocable, which would for ever stain
the memory and tarnish the gold of life when the perfect love should be
minted. Whatever faults of mind or disposition or character were his--
or hers--there were no sins against the pledges they had made, nor the
bond into which they had entered. Life would need no sponge. Memory
might still live on without a wound or a cowl of shame.
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