tedium of these intervals in the day's
amusement. If Tom Halliday had left her for an hour at a street-corner,
or before the door of a cafe, she would have tortured herself and him
by all manner of jealous suspicions and vague imaginings. But there was
a stern gravity in Mr. Sheldon's character which precluded the
possibility of any such shadowy fancies. Every action of his life
seemed to involve such serious motives, the whole tenor of his
existence was so orderly and business-like, that his wife was fain to
submit to him, as she would have submitted to some ponderous infallible
machine, some monster of modern ingenuity and steam power, which cut
asunder so many bars of iron, or punched holes in so many paving-stones
in a given number of seconds, and was likely to go on dividing iron or
piercing paving-stones for ever and ever.

She obeyed him, and was content to fashion her life according to his
will, chiefly because she had a vague consciousness that to argue with
him, or to seek to influence him, would be to attempt the impossible.
Perhaps there was something more than this in her mind--some
half-consciousness that there was a shapeless and invertebrate skeleton
lurking in the shadowy background of her new life, a dusky and
impalpable creature which it would not be well for her to examine or
understand. She was a cowardly little woman, and finding herself
tolerably happy in the present, she did not care to pierce the veil of
the future, or to cast anxious glances backward to the past. She
thought it just possible that there might be people in the world base
enough to hint that Philip Sheldon had married her for love of her
eighteen thousand pounds, rather than from pure devotion to herself.
She knew that certain prudent friends and kindred in Barlingford had
elevated their hands and eyebrows in speechless horror when they
discovered that she had married her second husband without a
settlement; while one grim and elderly uncle had asked her whether she
did not expect her father to turn in his grave by reason of her folly.

Georgy had shrugged her shoulders peevishly when her Barlingford
friends remonstrated with her, and had declared that people were very
cruel to her, and that it was a hard thing she could not choose for
herself for once in her life. As to the settlements that people talked
of, she protested indignantly that she was not so mean as to fancy her
future husband a thief, and that to tie up her money i