She had not told her mother the truth, for she, also, had been chiefly concerned with "keeping up an appearance." For the purpose of shielding George, who was blandly indifferent to her shielding, she had lied to her mother, if not in words, yet in an evasion of the truth, and the result was that her lies and her evasions had recoiled not on George's head, but on her own.

For George wouldn't care.

So little value did he place upon Mrs.Carr's good opinion, that he would not care even if Gabriella were to tell her the truth.

And if she had only been honest! If she had only refused to lie because custom exacted that a wife should be willing to lie in defense of her husband.

Some obscure strain of dogmatic piety struggled in the convulsed depths of her being, as if she had been suddenly brought up against the vein of iron in her soul--against the moral law, stripped bare of clustering delusions, which her ancestors had known and fought for as "the Berkeley conscience." The Berkeley conscience, bred for centuries on a militant faith, told her now that she was punished because she had lied to her mother.
Then, as if this reversion to primitive theology had been merely an automatic reaction of certain nerve cells, she saw and condemned the childlike superstition.