im as they were to her.
She had grown to have a very real affection for Dan, as indeed she
would have had for any one who was passably kind to her; but her
estimate of his character, as she gradually became acquainted with it,
was never influenced by her affection, except in so far as she pitied
him for traits which would have made her despise another man.

Since her marriage she had given up her free, wild, wandering habits.
She would go into the town to order things at the shops in the
morning, and take a solitary walk out into the country in the
afternoon perhaps, but without any keen enjoyment. Her natural zest
for the woods and fields was suspended. She had lost touch with
nature. Instead of looking about her observantly, as had been her
wont, she walked now, as a rule, with her eyes fixed on the ground,
thinking deeply. She was losing vitality too; her gait was less
buoyant, and she was becoming subject to aches and pains she had never
felt before. Dan said they were neuralgic, and showed that she wanted
a tonic, but troubled himself no more about them. He always seemed to
think she should be satisfied when he found a name for her complaint.
She had also become much thinner, which made her figure childishly
young; but in the face she looked old for her age--five-and-twenty at
least--although she was not yet eighteen.

There was one particularly strong and happy point in Beth's character:
she wasted little or no time in repining for the thing that was done.
All her thought was how to remedy the evil and make amends; so now,
when she had recovered from the first shock of her husband's
revelation, she put the thought of it aside, pulled herself together
quickly, and found relief in setting to work with a will. The exertion
alone was inspiriting, and re-aroused the faculty which had been
dormant in her of late. She went at once to get materials for her
work, and stepped out more briskly than she had done for many a day.
She perceived that the morning air was fresh and sweet, and she
inhaled deep draughts of it, and rejoiced in the sunshine. Just
opposite their house, across the road, on the other side of a wooden
paling, the park-like meadow was intensely green; old horse-chestnuts
dotted about it made refreshing intervals of shade; in the hedgerows
the tall elms stood out clear against the sky, and the gnarled oaks
cast fantastic shadows on the grass; while beyond it, at the farther
side of the meadow by the brook,