"Can you walk?"
"Oh, yes, I'm all right," she answered nervously. "I don't need your arm.
I can walk by myself."
"I think not--well, not yet, anyhow," he answered soothingly. "Please do
as you're told. I'm keeping my arm around you for the present."
Always in the past she had obeyed, when commanded by her mother or
husband, with an apathy which had smothered her youth. Now her youth
seemed to drink eagerly a cup of obedience--as though it were the wine of
life itself. She even longed to obey the voice whispering in her soul
from ever so far away: "Close--close to him! Home is in his arms."
With all her unconscious revelation of herself, however, there was that
in her which was pure maidenliness. For, married as she was, she had
never in any real sense been a wife, or truly understood what wifedom
meant, or heard in her heart the call of the cradle. She had been the
victim of possession, which had meant no more to her than to be, as it
were, subjected daily to the milder tortures of the Inquisition.
Yet she knew and could realize to the full that a power which had her in
control, which possessed her by the rights of the law, prevented her--and
would prevent her by whatever torture was possible--from friendship,
alliance, or whatever it might be, with Orlando. She knew the law: one
wife to one husband; and the wife to look neither to the right nor to the
left, to the east nor to the west, to the north nor to the south, but to
remain, and be constant in remaining, the helpmeet, the housewife, the
sole property of her husband, no matter what that husband might
be--vinous, vicious, vagrant, vengeful or any other things, good or bad.
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