At such moments she thought of this love as tenderly as a mother might have thought of the exquisite dead face of an infant who had lived only an hour.

Though it was over, though it bore no part, with its elusive loveliness, in her practical plans for the future, this dream became gradually, as the years passed, the most radiant and vital thing in her life.

Though it was so vague as to be without warmth, it was as vivid and as real as light.

The knowledge that in the past she had known perfect love, even though in her blindness she had thrust it aside, was a balm which healed her wounds and gave her courage to go on, friendless and alone, into the loveless stretch of the future.

There was hardly a minute of her day for the next three years which was not sweetened by this hyacinth-scented dream of the past, there was hardly an hour of her drudgery which was not ennobled and irradiated by the splendour of this love that she had lost.
Of George--even of George as the father of her children--she rarely thought.