She was grateful for that silence of his, because it justified her own.
They were both, by their temperaments, absurdly and diversely, almost incompatibly young.

At two-and-thirty Majendie, through very worldliness, was a boy in his infinite capacity for recoil from trouble.
Anne had preserved that crude and cloistral youth which belongs to all lives passed between walls that protect them from the world.

At seven-and-twenty she was a girl, with a girl's indestructible innocence.
She had not yet felt within her the springs of her own womanhood.
Marriage had not touched the spirit, which had kept itself apart even from her happiness, in the days that were given her to be happy in.

Her suffering was like a child's, and her attitude to it bitterly immature.
It bounded her; it annihilated the intellectual form of time, obliterating the past, and intercepting any view of a future.

Only, unlike a child, and unlike Majendie, she lacked the power of the rebound to joy.
"Dear," said her husband anxiously, as the cab drew up at the door of the house in Prior Street, "have you realised that poor Edith is probably preparing to receive us with glee?
Do you think you could manage to look a little less unhappy ?" The words were a shock to her, but they did her the service of a shock by recalling her to the realities outside herself.