Indisputably more beautiful than when Gerald had unwillingly made her his legal wife, she was now nearly twenty-four, and looked perhaps somewhat older than her age.  Her frame was firmly set, her waist thicker, neither slim nor stout.  The lips were rather hard, and she had a habit of tightening her mouth, on the same provocation as sends a snail into its shell.  No trace was left of immature gawkiness in her gestures or of simplicity in her intonations.  She was a woman of commanding and slightly arrogant charm, not in the least degree the charm of innocence and ingenuousness.  Her eyes were the eyes of one who has lost her illusions too violently and too completely.  Her gaze, coldly comprehending, implied familiarity with the abjectness of human nature.  Gerald had begun and had finished her education.  He had not ruined her, as a bad professor may ruin a fine voice, because her moral force immeasurably exceeded his; he had unwittingly produced a masterpiece, but it was a tragic masterpiece.  Sophia was such a woman as, by a mere glance as she utters an opinion, will make a man say to himself, half in desire and half in alarm lest she reads him too:  “By Jove! she must have been through a thing or two.  She knows what people are!”

The marriage was, of course, a calamitous folly.  From the very first, from the moment when the commercial traveller had with incomparable rash fatuity thrown the paper pellet over the counter, Sophia’s awakening commonsense had told her that in yielding to her instinct she was sowing misery and shame for herself; but she had gone on, as if under a spell.  It had needed the irretrievableness of flight from home to begin the breaking of the trance.  Once fully awakened out of the trance, she had recognized her marriage for what it was.  She had made neither the best nor the worst of it.  She had accepted Gerald as one accepts a climate.  She saw again and again that he was irreclaimably a fool and a prodigy of irresponsibleness.  She tolerated him, now with sweetness, now bitterly; accepting always his caprices, and not permitting herself to have wishes of her own.  She was ready to pay the price of pride and of a moment’s imbecility with a lifetime of self-repression.  It was high, but it was the price.  She had acquired nothing but an exceptionally good knowledge of the French language (she soon learnt to scorn Gerald’s glib maltreatment of the tongue), and she had conserved nothing but her dignity.  She knew that Gerald was sick of her, that he would have danced for joy to be rid of her; that he was constantly unfaithful; that he had long since ceased to be excited by her beauty.  She knew also that at bottom he was a little afraid of her; here was her sole moral consolation.  The thing that sometimes struck her as surprising was that he had not abandoned her, simply and crudely walked off one day and forgotten to take her with him.

They hated each other, but in different ways.  She loathed him, and he resented her.