'
This possibility was Nancy's chief comfort; and to give it
greater strength, she laboured to make it impossible that any other
wife should have had more perfect tenderness. She had been forced to
vex him by that one denial. Godfrey was not insensible to her loving
effort, and did Nancy no injustice as to the motives of her obstinacy.
It was impossible to have lived with her fifteen years and not be
aware that an unselfish clinging to the right, and a sincerity clear
as the flower-born dew, were her main characteristics; indeed, Godfrey
felt this so strongly, that his own more wavering nature, too averse
to facing difficulty to be unvaryingly simple and truthful, was kept
in a certain awe of this gentle wife who watched his looks with a
yearning to obey them. It seemed to him impossible that he should ever
confess to her the truth about Eppie: she would never recover from the
repulsion the story of his earlier marriage would create, told to
her now, after that long concealment. And the child, too, he
thought, must become an object of repulsion: the very sight of her
would be painful. The shock to Nancy's mingled pride and ignorance
of the world's evil might even be too much for her delicate frame.
Since he had married her with that secret on his heart he must keep it
there to the last. Whatever else he did, he could not make an
irreparable breach between himself and this long-loved wife.
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