The first object I saw was Anna’s child. It impressed me profoundly. I took him in my arms, and as I looked at him everything grew dark about me. I had been before the toy of a ceremony; I was now a conscious wife. Beautiful lawn and woodland, summer breezes, kindness, marriage rites even, what can they avail against the first awakening consciousness of a crime against nature? I was wholly without sympathy; there were none around me to understand me. If I had spoken my thought the very air would have been filled with condemnation. I, a wife, had I a right to entertain for an instant such an idea? Could I dare to experience an instinct of aversion? Had I a right to say I had been violated—that I was what all women loathe? I could not understand it; yet there it remained, a fact of my nature, asserting itself against the condition in which I was placed, and from which apparently no earthly power existed to release me. I returned to Easton an altered being; but this feeling wore off somewhat in the routine, and in the necessities of married life—for his father’s death, occurring shortly after, you remember, involved many changes and responsibilities, which turned, in a measure, for a time, the current of my thoughts. Afterwards succeeded, at constantly recurring intervals of a year or two, many other deaths in our families which tended to check my free indulgence of thought, till at last my feelings settled simply into a sense of a vague but awful responsibility of a violation of the social law. You must recall the constant distress and trouble into which we were all plunged by the successive deaths of his sister Anna, his aunt Catharine, my father and the children. The family at I—— Hall, too, was a weight which never ceased to press upon my heart, and, indeed, upon my whole existence. And so I lived, but not among the living. I had my inner life and my outward life—what, I doubt not, other women have had as well as this poor one at Catton. I drummed, in the old school-girl way, into my husband’s ears the set tunes for the piano, utterly unobservant of the music. I dressed in the same mechanical way to receive his relations, and thanked God when they were gone—and so underwent, beneath a conjugal yoke of continued kindness, a slow death. I entered into the life around me as an actress, real herself only when away from the stage of her action. I became the same that other women become, who turn from human faces to brute things for comfort. My early passion for horses and dogs proved then my consolation. I had to the full that mental nervousness which craves allayment in action. It would be impossible to admire a horse more than I had always done. It was an instinct of my nature, just as of Landseer’s, or of old Mary Breeze’s, of glorious memory; but I loved them now, for they were so much to me!