But with Nancy, poor Nancy! it was altogether another affair. It is a rash thing to come out of the world in which you were born. She had done it unintentionally, vowing with vehement asserverations that nothing would change her. And how she had struggled against all poor Arthur’s attempts! how she had clung, as it were, with clutching of desperate hands to the fabric of her original home! Those very corrections which she made in Matilda’s honest diction, had she not hotly resented them, fiercely refused them when Arthur had tried to suggest them to herself? But all that was changed. Nancy had drifted away from her own world--drifted into his; if she clutched at anything now, it was not at her old ark, but at the slippery rocks and sands of the other hemisphere on which she had been cast ashore. Falling upon it in her first footing, she had secretly kissed the soil as conquering invaders have done to avert the evil omen. She belonged no longer to that old universe which had been buried with the father and mother, the last lingering traces of which were to be carried away in Matilda’s trunks along with her careful outfit; but the other world had not yet received the trembling unavowed neophyte. Even now, rather than be brought into it by any formal force, by sense of duty, by the necessity laid upon her husband and his family, or by their pity, or by anything that could be construed into either, Nancy would have kept her wild word, and rushed away into the distant wilds with her sister. Had there been a word, or thought, of “arrangement,” of negotiation, even of right on the other side to claim her, or of right on her side to a certain place as Arthur’s wife, no request, no persuasion would have induced Nancy to accept what was thus settled for her. She did not even know what she would accept as a solution of the difficulty--even Arthur, did he stand before holding out his arms to her, might by some chance glance, some inadvertent word, turn her from him instead of bringing her to him. Her mind was still high-fantastical, though changed in so many other ways. But all that had happened since she came to Oakley had chimed in with her humour. The advances she had made in knowledge of her husband’s surroundings, and in the favour of his family had been of a kind that pleased and flattered her. The Curtises had been aware of no reason for modifying their criticism of her, or pretending to a liking they did not feel; but they had all “taken to” Nancy; and Lady Curtis had called her “my dear!” How haughtily would she have rejected that expression of kindness had it been applied to Arthur’s wife in the old days; but as given to the young stranger at Oakley, whose looks and ways had attracted my Lady, it was sweet. Yes! she had attracted them, she herself, not anything outside of her. Lucy--Lucy, indeed, had made doubtful response; but Sir John had “raved about her,” and Lady Curtis called her my dear! These thoughts made Nancy’s countenance glow.