Whatever the episode of
Susan Bennett might mean--if, indeed, such a man was not capable of
carrying on a dozen such little episodes--his manner to Christian
plainly showed that he admired her still; that he saw no difference
between the pretty maiden Christian Oakley and the matron Christian
Grey, and expressed this fact by tender tones and glances, alas! only
too familiarly known by her of old. "How dared he?"
Christian was a very simple woman. She knew nothing at all of that
fashionable world which, in its _blas?_ craving for excitement,
delights, both in life and in books, to tread daintily on the very confines
of guilt. She was not ignorant. She knew what sin was, as set forth in
the Ten Commandments, but she understood absolutely nothing of that
strange leniency or laxity which now-a-days makes vice so interesting
as to look like virtue, or mixes vice and virtue together in a knot of
circumstances until it is difficult to distinguish right from wrong.
Christian Grey was a wife. Therefore, both as wife and as woman, it
never occurred to her as the remotest possibility that she could indulge
in one tender thought of any man not her husband, or allow any man to
lift up the least corner of that veil of matronly dignity with which every
married woman, under whatever circumstances she has married or
whatever may befall her afterward, ought to enwrap herself forever.
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