The girl, she felt sure, was
in no danger at all from Edward. And in that she was perfectly
right. The smash was to come from herself.
She relaxed; she broke; she drifted, at first quickly, then with an
increasing momentum, down the stream of destiny. You may put it
that, having been cut off from the restraints of her religion, for the
first time in her life, she acted along the lines of her instinctive
desires. I do not know whether to think that, in that she was no
longer herself; or that, having let loose the bonds of her standards,
her conventions and her traditions, she was being, for the first
time, her own natural self. She was torn between her intense,
maternal love for the girl and an intense jealousy of the woman
who realizes that the man she loves has met what appears to be the
final passion of his life. She was divided between an intense
disgust for Edward's weakness in conceiving this passion, an
intense pity for the miseries that he was enduring, and a feeling
equally intense, but one that she hid from herself--a feeling of
respect for Edward's determination to keep himself, in this
particular affair, unspotted.
And the human heart is a very mysterious thing.
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