She knew the directions
to be a piece of the same stuff that his whole life was made of, and
hence were not to be tampered with to give herself a mournful pleasure,
or her husband credit for large-heartedness.
All was over at last, even her regrets for having misunderstood him on
his last visit, for not having searched him out sooner, though
these were deep and sharp for a good while. From this time forward
Elizabeth-Jane found herself in a latitude of calm weather, kindly and
grateful in itself, and doubly so after the Capharnaum in which some of
her preceding years had been spent. As the lively and sparkling emotions
of her early married live cohered into an equable serenity, the finer
movements of her nature found scope in discovering to the narrow-lived
ones around her the secret (as she had once learnt it) of making limited
opportunities endurable; which she deemed to consist in the cunning
enlargement, by a species of microscopic treatment, of those minute
forms of satisfaction that offer themselves to everybody not in positive
pain; which, thus handled, have much of the same inspiring effect upon
life as wider interests cursorily embraced.
Her teaching had a reflex action upon herself, insomuch that she thought
she could perceive no great personal difference between being respected
in the nether parts of Casterbridge and glorified at the uppermost end
of the social world.
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