It had soothed her perturbed
spirit better than all the opiates in the pharmacopoeia. She had
slept unbrokenly a whole night and a day. The "new law" was to
her a mysterious, beneficent, godlike entity, lately descended
upon earth, that would make her as she once had been without
trouble or annoyance. Her position fretted her, its abstract
features rousing an aversion which was even greater than her
aversion to the personality of him who had caused it. It was
mortifying, productive of slights, undignified. Him she could
forget; her circumstances she had always with her.
She saw nothing of Winterborne during the days of her recovery;
and perhaps on that account her fancy wove about him a more
romantic tissue than it could have done if he had stood before her
with all the specks and flaws inseparable from corporeity. He
rose upon her memory as the fruit-god and the wood-god in
alternation; sometimes leafy, and smeared with green lichen, as
she had seen him among the sappy boughs of the plantations;
sometimes cider-stained, and with apple-pips in the hair of his
arms, as she had met him on his return from cider-making in White
Hart Vale, with his vats and presses beside him.
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