Striving to read her conscience, which for years had been with her a daily task and was now become the anguish of every hour, she found it hard to establish valid reasons for steadfastly refusing a man who was her mother's choice.

She read over the marriage service frequently.

There stood the promise--to love, to honour, and to obey.

Honour and obedience she might render him, but what of love?
The question arose, what did love mean?
Could there be such a thing as love of an unworthy object?
Was she not led astray by the spirit of perverseness which was her heritage?
Adela could not bring herself to believe that 'to love' in the sense of the marriage service and to 'be in love' as her heart understood it were one and the same thing.

The Puritanism of her training led her to distrust profoundly those impulses of mere nature.