At each pause of her mental activity she was hurled against the state of marriage.

Compassion for her blameless fellow in misery brought a deluge to sweep away institutions and landmarks.
But supposing the blest worst to happen, what exchange had she to bestow?
Her beauty?
She was reputed beautiful.

It had made a madman of one man; and in her poverty of endowments to be generous with, she hovered over Mr.Morsfield like a cruel vampire, for the certification that she had a much-prized gift to bestow upon his rival.
But supposing it: she would then be no longer in the shiny garden of the flowers of wealth; and how little does beauty weigh as all aid to an active worker in the serious fighting world! She would be a kind of potted rose-tree under his arm, of which he must eventually tire.
A very cold moment came, when it seemed that even the above supposition, in the case of a woman who has been married, is shameful to her, a sin against her lover, and should be obliterated under floods of scarlet.
For, if she has pride, she withers to think of pushing the most noble of men upon his generosity.

And, further, if he is not delicately scrupulous, is there not something wanting in him?
The very cold wave passed, leaving the sentence: better dream of being plain friends.
Mrs.Pagnell had been quietly chewing her cud of the sullens, as was the way with her after a snub.

She now resumed her gossip of the naughty world she knelt to and expected to see some day stricken by a bolt from overhead; containing, as it did, such wicked members as that really indefensible brazen Mrs.Amy May, who was only the daughter of a half-pay naval captain, and that Marquis of Collestou, who would, they say, decorate her with his title to-morrow, if her husband were but somewhere else.