If they didn't know that Anne was dear and sweet, she did.

So did Walter.
If they wanted proof of it, why, would any other woman have put up with her and her wretched spine?
Weren't they all, Anne's friends, sorry for Anne just because of it, of her?
If you came to think of it, if you traced everything back to the beginning, her spine had been the cause of all Anne's troubles.
That was how she had always reasoned it out.

No suffering had ever obscured the lucidity of Edith's mind.

She knew that it was her spine that had kept her brother from marrying all those years.

He couldn't leave her alone with it, neither could he ask any woman to share the house inhabited, pervaded, dominated by it.