In such a moment you should not renounce your duties as mistress of the house.
You must understand this yourself." She replied "You annoy me." And, turning her back to him, she shut the door of her room between them.

That night in her bed she opened a book, as she always did before going to sleep.

It was a novel.

She was turning the leaves with indifference, when her eyes fell on these lines: "Love is like devotion: it comes late.

A woman is hardly in love or devout at twenty, unless she has a special disposition to be either, a sort of native sanctity.