Edith declared that she knew nothing of Anne’s austere and impressive attributes.  She protested against anything so dreary as the other people’s view of her.  They and their absurd pedestals!  She refused to regard her sister-in-law as an established solemnity, eminent and lonely in the scene.  Pedestals were all very well at a proper distance, but at a close view they were foreshortening to the human figure.  Other people might like to see more pedestal than Anne; she preferred to see more Anne than pedestal.  If they didn’t know that Anne was dear and sweet, she did.  So did Walter.

If they wanted proof of it, why, would any other woman have put up with her and her wretched spine?  Weren’t they all, Anne’s friends, sorry for Anne just because of it, of her?  If you came to think of it, if you traced everything back to the beginning, her spine had been the cause of all Anne’s troubles.

That was how she had always reasoned it out.  No suffering had ever obscured the lucidity of Edith’s mind.  She knew that it was her spine that had kept her brother from marrying all those years.  He couldn’t leave her alone with it, neither could he ask any woman to share the house inhabited, pervaded, dominated by it.  Unsafeguarded by marriage, he had fallen into evil hands.  To Edith, who had plenty of leisure for reflection, all this had become terribly clear.

Then Anne had come, the strong woman who could bear Walter’s burden for him.  She had been jealous of Anne at first, for five minutes.  Then she had blessed her.

But Edith, as she had told her brother, was not a fool.  And all the time, while her heart leapt to the image of Anne in her dearness and sweetness, her brain saw perfectly well that her sister-in-law had not been free from the sin of pride (that came, said Edith, of standing on a pedestal.  It was better to lie on a couch than stand on a pedestal; you knew, at any rate, where you were).

Now, as Edith also said, there can be nothing more prostrating to a woman’s pride than a bad bilious attack.  Especially when it exposes you to the devoted ministrations of a husband you have made up your mind to disapprove of, and compels you to a baffling view of him.

Anne owned herself baffled.

Her attack had chastened her.  She had been touched by Walter’s kindness, by the evidence (if she had needed it) that she was as dear to him in her ignominious agony as she had been in the beauty of her triumphal health.  As he moved about her, he became to her insistent outward sense the man she had loved because of his goodness.  It was so that she had first seen his strong masculine figure moving about Edith on her couch, handling her with the supreme gentleness of strength.  She had not been two days in the house in Prior Street before her memories assailed her.  Her new and detestable view of Walter contended with her old beloved vision of him.  The two were equally real, equally vivid, and she could not reconcile them.  Walter himself, seen again in his old surroundings, was protected by an army of associations.  The manifestations of his actual presence were also such as to appeal to her memory against her judgment.  Her memory was in league with her.  But when the melting mood came over her, her conscience resisted and rose against them both.