
what was not given.
    Perhaps it was this very severity towards any indulgence of what she held to
be sinful regret in herself, that made her shrink from applying her own standard
to her husband. »It is very different - it is much worse for a man to be
disappointed in that way: a woman can always be satisfied with devoting herself
to her husband, but a man wants something that will make him look forward more -
and sitting by the fire is so much duller to him than to a woman.« And always,
when Nancy reached this point in her meditations - trying, with predetermined
sympathy, to see everything as Godfrey saw it - there came a renewal of
self-questioning. Had she done everything in her power to lighten Godfrey's
privation? Had she really been right in the resistance which had cost her so
much pain six years ago, and again four years ago - the resistance to her
husband's wish that they should adopt a child? Adoption was more remote from the
ideas and habits of that time than of our own; still Nancy had her opinion on
it. It was as necessary to her mind to have an opinion on all topics, not
exclusively masculine, that had come under her notice, as for her to have a
precisely marked place for every article of her personal property: and her
opinions were always principles to be unwaveringly acted on. They were firm, not
because of their basis, but because she held them with a tenacity inseparable
from her mental action. On all the duties and proprieties of life, from filial
behaviour to the arrangements of the evening toilet, pretty Nancy Lammeter, by
the time she was three-and-twenty, had her unalterable little code, and had
formed every one of her habits in strict accordance with that code. She carried
these decided judgments within her in the most unobtrusive way: they rooted
themselves in her mind, and grew there as quietly as grass. Years ago, we know,
she insisted on dressing like Priscilla, because »it was right for sisters to
dress alike,« and because »she would do what was right if she wore a gown dyed
with cheese-colouring.« That was a trivial but typical instance of the mode in
which Nancy's life was regulated.
    It was one of those rigid principles, and no petty egoistic feeling, which
had been the ground of Nancy's difficult resistance to her husband's wish. To
adopt a child, because children of your own had been denied you, was to try and
choose your lot in spite of
