Gregory had been so suddenly and so completely withdrawn! She adapted
herself without bewilderment to the new order. She became as a girl,
betrothed to Linnet. Their relationship had all the innocence of a
betrothal. Her past life might have been blotted out, the future so far
distant (down a vista of ten days!) as to be, for all practical
purposes, negligible. She could have drawn from this a proof that the
violence of the years lived between Gregory and Silas had made upon her
being only a mark such as might be soon effaced. She, the true Nan, had
slipped away from violence, because violence was so unalterably alien to
her. The lesson of violence was a lesson she might provisionally learn,
but would never long remember. She went out now to meet the condition
she had always wanted: the secure tenderness, the settlement, once and
for all, in her choice; she was not one who would demand variety upon
the face of existence. Variety! she had had it; excitement, uncertainty,
passion, and the weight of failure all around her, reckless because
resigned; she had had all that, compressed within the limits of an iron
circle; those were not the things she wanted. The things she wanted were
the things that Linnet could give her.
The subtle sarcasms of Silas were incapable of troubling her quiet
discernment.