,
seemed to have transformed itself into the sound of fate's deep bell.
She could hear the clang, sharp, definite. She realized suddenly and
with awe that her destiny was fixed hereafter. She had come to the end
of her adventures and her vague dreams. For she had always dreamt
vaguely of an enlarged liberty, of wide interests, and of original
activities--such as no woman to her knowledge had ever had. She had
always compared the life of men with the life of women, and admitted and
resented the inferiority of the latter. She had had glimpses, once, of
the male world; she had made herself the only woman shorthand-writer in
the Five Towns, and one of the earliest in England--dizzy thought! But
the glimpses had been vain and tantalizing. She had been in the male
world, but not of it, as though encircled in a glass ball which neither
she nor the males could shatter. She had had money, freedom, and
ambition, and somehow, through ignorance or through lack of imagination
or opportunity, had been unable to employ them. She had never known what
she wanted. The vision had never been clear. And she reflected: "I
wonder if my daughter, supposing I had one, would be as different from
me as I am from my mother!"

She could recall with intense vividness the moment when she had first
really contemplated marriage. It was in the steam-tram after having seen
Edwin Clayhanger at the door of Clayhanger's shop. And she could recall
the sense of relief with which she had envisaged a union with some man
stronger and more experienced than herself. In the relief was a certain
secret shame, as though it implied cowardice, a shrinking away from the
challenge of life and from the call of a proud instinct. In the
steam-tram she had foreseen the time when she would belong utterly to
some man, surrendering to him without reserve, the time when she would
be a woman. And the thing had come about! Only yesterday she had been a
little girl entering George Cannon's office with timid audacity to
consult him. Only yesterday George Cannon had been a strange, formidable
man, indefinitely older and infinitely cleverer than she. And now they
were man and wife! Now she was his! Now she profoundly knew him, and he
was no longer formidable, in spite of his force. She had a recondite
dominion over him. She guessed herself to be his superior in certain
qualities. He was revealed to her; she felt that she was not revealed to
him, and that in spite of her wholehearted s