Sec.5

It seemed to her husband that it was both unreasonable 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 permissible phase
for her, as she was, and so he expressed his impatience 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 vividly interrupted, and if her schooldays
were truncated 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 interval of indifferent health
she had a fourth girl baby of a physique quite obviously inferior to its
predecessors, 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 inevitable fact she had come,
she hardly knew how, to a renewed disposition to regard this large and
various universe beyond him and outside of him, with something of the
same slight adventurousness 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 hers