These affectionate welcomes, this show of cordiality at least warmed the sick and sad heart of a young wife, and indicated at the outset her path of safety. Yes, it was a pious and salutary work to envelop in an ideal world this timid child of nature who was being consigned to a lord and master. It would have been barbarous to check this joy in external things; to show the poor girl from the very first the cutting of bread-and-butter as the be-all and end-all of a woman’s life; to shut out from her view all that lends brightness and colour to the world. On the contrary, thanks to the smiles with which heaven and earth greeted her, a woman of intelligence and sensibility entered upon her mission with a stout heart, in the vague anticipation that fortune was bound to smile upon her still. Where was the harm? There was nothing in her hopes to prevent her from treading the stoical path of destiny and lending herself to the material functions that devolved upon her. But her eyes were opened, she perceived the dawn for her of a life which her husband had long known. It was now her turn to blossom out; she became conscious of her soul, and understood that she too was to be entitled to her youth. CHAPTER II THE MARRIED WOMAN “Woman, in my judgment, is the stumbling-block in a man’s career. To love a woman and yet do anything worth doing is very difficult, and the only way to escape being reduced by love to a life of idleness is to marry.” There is nothing new in this reflection, put by Tolstoï into the mouth of one of his characters.[36] Such was the theory of the Middle Ages—fatal love! The new-fledged husband was under no illusion in the matter: he had married to cure himself of love, or rather to have done with it for ever, to turn from woman and towards higher things; he would never have imagined any connection between his marital duties and his soul. First and last, wedlock had no romance for him. Marriage was the worn and dusty highway of materialities. Nor did the expectations of the young girl soar any higher. Shown the simple truth by the solemn personages to whom she owed her upbringing, sedulously guarded against any kind of illusion, she knew all there was to know about her new duties, and in regard to these it was thought peculiarly necessary to arm her against errors and enthusiasms that might bring disappointments in their train. Marriage she had always looked upon as a natural function with excellent precedents, and she had studied its rules, in their rudiments at least, so as to be able to guide her steps intelligently in a career that had necessarily its technical side.