To lose her novels and her new dress together, and be threatened with nasty moral medicine--for she had never read a word of Carlyle beyond his translation of that dream of Richter's, and imagined him dry as a sand-pit--was bad enough, but to be so reproved by her husband was more than she could bear.

If she was a silly and ignorant creature, she had the heart of a woman-child; and that precious thing in the sight of God, wounded and bruised by the husband in whom lay all her pride, went on beating laboriously for him only.
She did not blame him.

Anything was better than that.

The dear, simple soul had a horror of rebuke.

It would break hedges and climb stone walls to get out of the path of judgment--ten times more eagerly if her husband were the judge.