Even music for review seemed to have failed her.
She had never lived in London, so that she had not the refuge of old
haunts and habits, but had to make her own--and to make habits and
haunts required a heart that could at least stretch out feelers and lay
hold of things, and her heart was not now able. When she had struggled
with her Edwardian flat, and laid down her simple routine of meals, she
was as stranded as ever was, convict let out of prison. She had not even
that great support, the necessity of hiding her feelings for fear of
disturbing others. She was planted there, with her longing and grief,
and nothing, nobody, to take her out of herself. Having wilfully
embraced this position, she tried to make the best of it, feeling it
less intolerable, at all events, than staying on at Monkland, where she
had made that grievous, and unpardonable error--falling in love.
This offence, on the part of one who felt within herself a great
capacity to enjoy and to confer happiness, had arisen--like the
other grievous and unpardonable offence, her marriage--from too much
disposition to yield herself to the personality of another. But it was
cold comfort to know that the desire to give and to receive love had
twice over left her--a dead woman. Whatever the nature of those immature
sensations with which, as a girl of twenty, she had accepted her
husband, in her feeling towards Miltoun there was not only abandonment,
but the higher flame of self-renunciation.
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