her child: but there was not the least fear in her heart that
it would ever come to pass. She had not known how often the old people
would come and sit by her bed, looking terrible.

Yes, they had looked terrible, but not, seen across the years,
inexplicable. Grandmother had spent all her life being the good wife of
Edward Yaverland, and she had not liked him, for in the days when she
had ransacked her memory for pretty tales to tell her little grandchild
she had never spoken of any place she had visited with him; and indeed
the daguerreotype on the parlour wall showed a man teased by developing
prosperity as by an inward growth, whose eye would change pink
apple-blossom to a computable promise of cider. It is not in the nature
of any human being to admit that they have wasted their whole life, and
since she had certainly gained no treasure of love from her forty years
with her husband it was necessary that she should invent some good
purpose which that tedious companionship had served. The theory of the
sanctity of marriage came in handy; it comforted her to believe that by
merely being a wife she had fulfilled a function pleasing to God and
necessary to the existence of society. But she had so often been
assailed by moments when it had seemed that during all her living life
had not begun, that she had to believe it passionately to quiet those
doubts. To have asked her to stay away from the bedside would have been
to ask her to admit that her life was useless, and that it would have
been better if she had not been born. "Lord have mercy on us all!"
thought Marion, and forgave her.

It was not so easy to forgive Aunt Alphonsine, for her voice had been as
sharp as it could be without being honestly angry, like bad wine instead
of good vinegar, and had run indefatigably up the switchbacks on which
the voices of Frenchwomen travel eternally. She was the most responsible
for the defeat of Marion's life. And yet Aunt Alphonsine too was not
malignant of intent. The worst of illicit relationships is the
provocation they give to the minds that hear of them. When it is said of
a man and woman that they are married, the imagination sees the public
ceremony before the altar, the shared house, the children, and all the
sober external results of marriage; but when it is said of a man and
woman that they are lovers, the imagination is confronted with the fact
of their love. The thought of her niece night after night shut up with
lo