With the end of this interview, with the departure of Marchmont, still
sore, angry, and blind to her point of view, May felt that the matter had
settled itself. She knew in her heart that she would not have turned
Marchmont away unless she had meant to bid Quisante come. For a little
while she struggled against finality, telling herself that the question
was still an open one, and that to refuse one man was not of necessity to
marry another. Other friends came and talked to her, but none of them got
within her guard or induced her to speak freely to them. In the end she
had to settle this thing for herself; and now it was settled.
Even when undertaken in the conviction of a full harmony of feeling, a
community of mind, and an identity of tastes, marriage may startle by the
extent of its demands. She was to marry a man--she faced the matter and
told herself this--a man from whom she was divided by the training of a
lifetime, by antagonisms of feeling so acute as to bite deep into their
every-day intercourse, by a jarring of tastes which made him sometimes
odious to her.
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