with this daughter.
    »I wonder what mamma and my uncle would say if they knew about Mrs.
Glasher!« thought Gwendolen, in her inward debating; not that she could imagine
herself telling them, even if she had not felt bound to silence. »I wonder what
anybody would say; or what they would say to Mr. Grandcourt's marrying some one
else and having other children!« To consider what »anybody« would say, was to be
released from the difficulty of judging where everything was obscure to her when
feeling had ceased to be decisive. She had only to collect her memories, which
proved to her that »anybody« regarded illegitimate children as more rightfully
to be looked shy on and deprived of social advantages than illegitimate fathers.
The verdict of »anybody« seemed to be that she had no reason to concern herself
greatly on behalf of Mrs. Glasher and her children.
    But there was another way in which they had caused her concern. What others
might think, could not do away with a feeling which in the first instance would
hardly be too strongly described as indignation and loathing that she should
have been expected to unite herself with an outworn life, full of backward
secrets which must have been more keenly felt than any associations with her.
True, the question of love on her own part had occupied her scarcely at all in
relation to Grandcourt. The desirability of marriage for her had always seemed
due to other feelings than love; and to be enamoured was the part of the man, on
whom the advances depended. Gwendolen had found no objection to Grandcourt's way
of being enamoured before she had had that glimpse of his past, which she
resented as if it had been a deliberate offence against her. His advances to her
were deliberate, and she felt a retrospective disgust for them. Perhaps other
men's lives were of the same kind - full of secrets which made the ignorant
suppositions of the woman they wanted to marry a farce at which they were
laughing in their sleeves.
    These feelings of disgust and indignation had sunk deep; and though other
troublous experience in the last weeks had dulled them from passion into
remembrance, it was chiefly their reverberating activity which kept her firm to
the understanding with herself, that she was not going to accept Grandcourt. She
had never meant to form a new determination; she had only been considering what
might be thought or said. If anything could have induced her to change, it would
have been the prospect of making all things easy for »poor mamma:« that, she
admitted, was a temptation.