It was natural that when she had signed the will at last, she should receive her aunt's effusive thanks rather coldly, and that she should show very little enthusiasm when her uncle kissed her forehead and expressed his appreciation of her loving intention.

The plain truth was that if she had refused any longer to sign the will, the two would have made her life even more unbearable than it was already.
She knew that there was no reason why her life should be made hard to bear.

She was not only rich, and a princess in her own right.

She was young and, if not pretty, at least fairly well endowed with those gifts which attract and please, and bring their possessor the daily little satisfactions that make something very like happiness, before passion throws its load into the scales of life on the right side or the wrong.
She knew that, at her age, she might have been married already, and she wondered that her aunt should not have proposed to marry her before now.
Yet in this she was not displeased, for her best friend, Bianca Campodonico, had been married two years already to Corleone, of evil fame, and was desperately unhappy.

Veronica dreaded a like fate, and was in no haste to find a husband.