Until her children came she was the most wholly
self-sufficient person I've ever known. She was really only happy when she
was entirely alone, always. It wasn't egotism exactly--she's always had a
very-well-mannered conviction of her own relative unimportance--it was
just that in spite of the fact that she seemed so perfectly healthy and
calm and composed whenever she was with other people they'd be sure to
hurt her a little somehow or other without meaning to--the only person she
could genuinely depend on never to hurt her was herself.
"As for men, she'd formed one crystallized opinion of men in the first
weeks of our marriage and she's kept it ever since. She looks at them as
if they were a kind of tame wolf about the house--something you must never
show you're afraid of, something you must feed and look after and be
publicly amiable to because you must be just--but something you never
never would bring in the house of your own accord or touch without feeling
that you, that you had to preserve so jealously against all the things
that could possibly hurt it, start to shrink and be pained inside.
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