Also, she learned to understand that there might be greater weight and meaning in his confession than she had been inclined to allow to it at the time; that, at any rate, its extravagances ought not to be set down entirely, as her father-in-law had suggested with such extreme cleverness, to the vagaries of a mind suffering from sudden shock and alarm.
All these conclusions made Mary anxious, by wrapping her husband round with common domestic cares and a web of daily, social incident, to bury the memory of this Stella beneath ever-thickening strata of forgetfulness; not that in themselves these reminiscences, however hallowed, could do her any further actual harm; but because the train of thought evoked thereby was, as she conceived, morbid, and dangerous to the balance of his mind.
The plan seemed wise and good, and, in the case of most men, probably would have succeeded.

Yet in Morris's instance from the commencement it was a failure.

She had begun by making his story and ideas, absurd enough on the face of them, an object of somewhat acute sarcasm, if not of ridicule.

This was a mistake, since thereby she caused him to suppress every outward evidence of them; to lock them away in the most secret recesses of his heart.

If the lid of a caldron full of fluid is screwed down while a fire continues to burn beneath it, the steam which otherwise would have passed away harmlessly, gathers and struggles till the moment of inevitable catastrophe.