The whole story, occupying in all only four weeks, had gone by exactly like a dream, and she had awakened--awakened to find out what love really was, or what it might have been.
She wept, not loudly, but quietly, till she dared not weep any more.

A sudden thought made her struggle at once for composure, and try to efface every external trace of tears.
"I am Dr.Grey's wife," she said to herself and resolved that the grand University magnates should find out nothing in her unworthy of that name--nothing that could make people say, even the most ill-natured of them--and, alas! she had lately come to learn that the world is filled, not, as she thought, with only bad and good, but with an intermediate race, which is merely ill-natured--say, with a sneer, that Dr.Grey's second marriage had been "a mistake." Never before had Christian thought much of these outside things; but she did now--at least she tried her best.

There was not a lock unsmoothed in her fair hair, not a fold awry in her silks or laces, and not a trace of agitation visible in her manner or countenance when Mrs.
Grey opened her door to descend the stairs.
She was considering whether it would not be courteous to knock at Miss Gascoigne's door, and ask if she too were ready, when she heard a loud outcry in the nursery above.

This, alas! was no novelty.

More than once Christian had rushed wildly up stairs, expecting some dreadful catastrophe, but it was only the usual warfare between Phillis and the children, especially Arthur, who was no longer a baby to be petted and scolded, or a little girl to be cowed into obedience, but a big boy to be ruled, if at all, _vi et armis_--as Mrs.Grey had more than once suspected Phillis did rule.
"I wont! I won't! and you shan't make me!" was the fierce scream which caught her ear before she entered the nursery door.
There stood Phillis, her face red with passion, grasping Arthur with one hand, and beating him with the other, while the boy, holding on to her with the tenacity of a young bull-dog, was, with all the might of his little fists, returning blow for blow--in short, a regular stand-up fight, in which the two faces, elder and younger, woman and child, were alike in obstinacy and fury.