Emily's sense of the sanctity of relations such as those between Wilfrid and herself had, through so different a cause, very much the same effects as what we call false shame.

The complex motives of virgin modesty had with her become a conscious sustaining power, a faith; of all beautiful things that the mind could conceive, this mystery was the loveliest, and the least capable of being revealed to others, however near, without desecration.

Perhaps she had been aided in the nurturing of this ideal by her loneliness; no friend had ever tempted her to confidences; her gravest and purest thoughts had never been imparted to any.

Thus she had escaped that blunting of fine perceptions which is the all but inevitable result of endeavouring to express them.

Not to speak of mere vulgarity such as Jessie Cartwright exhibited, Emily's instinct shrank from things which usage has, for most people, made matters of course; the public ceremony of marriage, for instance, she deemed a barbarism.
As a sacrament, the holiest of all, its celebration should, she felt, be in the strictest privacy; as for its aspect as a legal contract, let that concession to human misery be made with the smallest, not the greatest, violation of religious feeling.