If she had entertained the wish, she would hardly have acknowledged to herself the hope, that she might remain permanently the sole partner of my home.

But so sudden, speedy, and wholesale an intrusion thereon she certainly had not expected.

Even in Mars, a first bride generally enjoys for some time a monopoly of her husband's society, if she cannot be said to enchain his affection.

It was hard, indeed, before the thirtieth day after her marriage, to find herself but one in a numerous family--the harder that our union had from the first been close, intimate, unrestrainedly confidential, as it can hardly be where neither expects that the tie can remain exclusive; and because she had learned to realise and rest upon such love as belongs to a life in which woman, never affecting the independence of coequal partnership, has never yet sunk by reaction into a mere slave and toy.
It was hard, cruelly hard, on one who had given in the first hour of marriage, and never failed to give, a love whose devotion had no limit, no reserve or qualification; a submission that was less self-sacrifice or self-suppression than the absolute surrender of self--of will, feeling, and self-interest--to the judgment and pleasure of him she loved: hard on her who had neither thought nor care for herself as apart from me.
When I understood to what I had actually committed myself, I snatched the papers from her, and might have torn them to pieces but for the gentle restraining hand she laid upon mine.
"You cannot help it," she said, the tears falling from her eyes, but with a self-command of which I could not have supposed her capable.
"It seems hard on me; but it is better so.

It is not that you are not content with me, not that you love me less.