she was suddenly strangely brought face to face with a tragedy
of her own, that was not enough to turn this innocent and modest girl
into a raging Eleanor. She was profoundly reasonable in her simple way,
unapt to blame; thinking no evil, and full of those prepossessions and
fixed canons of innocence which the world-instructed are incapable not
only of understanding, but of believing in the existence of. A
connection between a man and a woman was to her, in one way or other, a
marriage. Into the reasons, whatever they might have been, that could
have brought about any such connection without the rites that made it
sacred, she could not penetrate or inquire. It was a subject too
terrible, from which her mind retreated with awe and incomprehension.
Never could it, she felt, have been intended so, at least on the woman's
side. The mock marriage of romance, the deceits practised on the stage
and in novels upon the innocent, she believed in without hesitation,
everything in the world being more comprehensible than impurity. There
might be villainous men, betrayers, seducers, Lucy could not tell; there
might be monsters, griffins, fiery dragons, for anything she knew; but a
woman abandoned by all her natural guard of modesties and reluctances,
moved by passion, capable of being seduced, she could not understand.
And still more impossible was it to imagine such sins as the outcome of
mere levity, without any tragic circumstances; or to conceive of the
mysteries of life as outraged and intruded upon by folly, or for the
darker bait of interest. Her heart sickened at such suggestions. She
knew there were poor women in the streets, victims of want and vice,
poor degraded creatures for whom her heart bled, whom she could not
think of for the intolerable pang of pity and shame. But all these
questions had nothing to do with the sudden revelation in which she
herself had so painful a part. These broken reflections were in her mind
like the falling of snow. They whirled through the vague world of her
troubled soul without consequence or coherence; all that had nothing to
do with her. Her husband was no villain, and the woman--the beautiful,
smiling woman, so much fairer, greater, more important than Lucy, she
was no wretched, degraded creature. What was she then? His wife--his
true wife? And if so, what was Lucy? Her brain reeled and the world went
round her in a sickening whirl. The circumstances were too terrible for
resentment. Wha