Proud and wilful as of old, she had brought those qualities into such subjection to her beauty that it was impossible and out of nature — or I thought so — to separate them from her beauty. Truly it was impossible to dissociate her presence from all those wretched hankerings after money and gentility that had disturbed my boyhood, — from all those ill-regulated aspirations that had first made me ashamed of home and Joe, — from all those visions that had raised her face in the glowing fire, struck it out of the iron on the anvil, extracted it from the darkness of night to look in at the wooden window of the forge, and flit away.

In a word, it was impossible for me to separate her, in the past or in the present, from the innermost life of my life.