She had, indeed, learned to tell
herself that she could not love her husband; and once, in the
excitement of such silent announcements to herself, she had asked
herself whether her heart was quite a blank, and had answered herself
by desiring Phineas Finn to absent himself from Loughlinter. During
all the subsequent winter she had scourged herself inwardly for her
own imprudence, her quite unnecessary folly in so doing. What! could
not she, Laura Standish, who from her earliest years of girlish
womanhood had resolved that she would use the world as men use it,
and not as women do,--could not she have felt the slight shock of
a passing tenderness for a handsome youth without allowing the
feeling to be a rock before her big enough and sharp enough for the
destruction of her entire barque? Could not she command, if not her
heart, at any rate her mind, so that she might safely assure herself
that, whether this man or any man was here or there, her course would
be unaltered? What though Phineas Finn had been in the same house
with her throughout all the winter, could not she have so lived with
him on terms of friendship, that every deed and word and look of her
friendship might have been open to her husband,--or open to all
the world? She could have done so.
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