O how I envied him his feelings!

She came to admire him so much that his love for her affected her own self-esteem: She liked herself better because of him.

She respected her husband in the same way as she respected the General Post Office, as something large, secure and fixed: and though she knew the small number of his talents she appreciated his abstract value as a male.

He had the very greatest admiration. He admire her for her truthfulness, for her cleanness of mind, and the clean-run-ness of her limbs, for her efficiency, for the fairness of her skin, for the gold of her hair, for her religion, for her sense of duty. It was a satisfaction to take her about with him.

She had liked him for himself, that was indisputable. And yet, much as she had liked him she had liked the bourgeois standard of valuation more.

She found herself suddenly surrounded by a host of assumptions. It was assumed that she trembled for joy in his presence, languished in his absence, existed solely (but humbly) for the furtherance of his ambitions, and thought him the most remarkable man alive, as she herself was the most favoured of women, a belief in which everybody was fondly prepared to indulge her. Such was the unanimity of these assumptions that she was almost persuaded into believing them true.

She did love him, you know... It was a selfish, possessive love, but it was all she knew how to give.

She did not understand what all that meant, but it was evidently something very near his heart, and so she said, "How splendid!"

She rested her head against his and felt, for the first time, what she would often feel with him: a self-affection. He made her like herself.

She thought that before old age and death there would be a long, long life before her, and that day by day she would have to put up with being close to a man she did not love, who had just now come into the bedroom and was getting into bed, and would have to stifle in her heart her hopeless love for the other young, fascinating, and, as she thought, exceptional man. She looked at her husband and tried to say good-night to him, but suddenly burst out crying instead. She was vexed with herself. And all at once he put his arm round her waist, while she, without knowing what she was doing, laid her hands on his shoulders and for a minute gazed with ecstasy, almost intoxication, at his clever, ironical face, his brow, his eyes, his handsome beard.

And suddenly something unforgettable occurred: suddenly she felt a desire to go to him and hear his voice, his words. If he spoke to her in a soft, deep voice her soul would take courage and rise to the surface of her body, and she would burst our crying. She would put her arms around him the way she had put her arms around the chestnut tree's thick trunk in her dream.

As she watched him she understood the quality of his beauty. How his labor had shaped him. How the wood he fashioned had fashioned him. Each plank he planed, each nail he drove, each thing he made molded him. Had left its stamp on him. Had given him his strength, his supple grace.

She would have liked to love. It was terrible to think she had never loved her son as a man. Sometimes her hands would wrestle together. They were supple, rather plump hands, broad and not yet dry. But wrestling like this together, they were papery and dried-up. Then she would force herself into some deliberate activity or speak tenderly to her good husband, offering him things to eat, and seeing to his clothes. She loved her husband. Even after the drudgery of love she could still love him. But sometimes she lay on her side and said, I have not loved him enough, not yet, he has not seen the evidence of love. It would have been simpler if she had been able to turn and point to the man their son, but she could not.

Her heart did whisper that he had done it for her.