eaking upon such a subject with
her mother; strange though it may sound, the intimacy between them was
not near enough to encourage such a disclosure, with all the
explanations it would involve. Nor yet to her father would she willingly
speak of what had happened, until it became necessary to do so. Emily's
sense of the sanctity of relations such as those between Wilfrid and
herself had, through so different a cause, very much the same effects as
what we call false shame. The complex motives of virgin modesty had with
her become a conscious sustaining power, a faith; of all beautiful
things that the mind could conceive, this mystery was the loveliest, and
the least capable of being revealed to others, however near, without
desecration. Perhaps she had been aided in the nurturing of this ideal
by her loneliness; no friend had ever tempted her to confidences; her
gravest and purest thoughts had never been imparted to any. Thus she had
escaped that blunting of fine perceptions which is the all but
inevitable result of endeavouring to express them. Not to speak of mere
vulgarity such as Jessie Cartwright exhibited, Emily's instinct shrank
from things which usage has, for most people, made matters of course;
the public ceremony of marriage, for instance, she deemed a barbarism.
As a sacrament, the holiest of all, its celebration should, she felt, be
in the strictest privacy; as for its aspect as a legal contract, let
that concession to human misery be made with the smallest, not the
greatest, violation of religious feeling. Thinking thus, it was natural
that she should avail herself of every motive for delay. And in that
very wretchedness of her home which her marriage would, she trusted, in
a great measure alleviate, she found one of the strongest. The
atmosphere of sordid suffering depressed her; it was only by an effort
that she shook off the influences which assailed her sadder nature; at
times her fears were wrought upon, and it almost exceeded her power to
believe in the future Wilfrid had created for her. The change from the
beautiful home in Surrey to the sad dreariness of Banbrigg had followed
too suddenly upon the revelation of her blessedness. It indisposed her
to make known what was so dreamlike. For the past became more dreadful
viewed from the ground of hope. Emily came to contemplate it as some
hideous beast, which, though she seemed to be escaping its reach, might
even yet spring upon her. How had she borne tha