If she had it, the thing was not to be hauled up to consciousness.

Her feeling was, that she forgave the wrinkled Malignity: pity and contrition dissolving in the effort to produce the placable forgiveness.

She was frigid because she knew rightly of herself, that she in the place of power would never have struck so meanly.

But the mainspring of the feeling in an almost remorseless bosom drew from certain chance expressions of retrospective physical distaste on Victor's part;--hard to keep from a short utterance between the nuptial two, of whom the unshamed exuberant male has found the sweet reverse in his mate, a haven of heavenliness, to delight in:--these conjoined with a woman's unspoken pleading ideas of her own, on her own behalf, had armed her jealously in vindication of Nature.
Now, as long as they did no palpable wrong about them, Nataly could argue her case in her conscience--deep down and out of hearing, where women under scourge of the laws they have not helped decree may and do deliver their minds.

She stood in that subterranean recess for Nature against the Institutions of Man: a woman little adapted for the post of revel; but to this, by the agency of circumstances, it had come; she who was designed by nature to be an ornament of those Institutions opposed them and when thinking of the rights and the conduct of the decrepit Legitimate--virulent in a heathen vindictiveness declaring itself holy--she had Nature's logic, Nature's voice, for self-defence.