Air, light, books, and her friend, these good things she had; they were all she wanted.

She rode, she walked, with Sir Lukin or Mr.Redworth, for companion; or with Saturday and Sunday guests, Lord Larrian, her declared admirer, among them.

'Twenty years younger!' he said to her, shrugging, with a merry smile drawn a little at the corners to sober sourness; and she vowed to her friend that she would not have had the heart to refuse him.
'Though,' said she, 'speaking generally, I cannot tell you what a foreign animal a husband would appear in my kingdom.' Her experience had wakened a sexual aversion, of some slight kind, enough to make her feminine pride stipulate for perfect independence, that she might have the calm out of which imagination spreads wing.

Imagination had become her broader life, and on such an earth, under such skies, a husband who is not the fountain of it, certainly is a foreign animal: he is a discordant note.

He contracts the ethereal world, deadens radiancy.
He is gross fact, a leash, a muzzle, harness, a hood; whatever is detestable to the free limbs and senses.