And her thoughts had travelled fast and far since that evening. She had no longer any doubt that he loved somebody, and she had made up her mind that it was Hester who was the object of his love. This had caused her perhaps the greatest mental conflict she had ever known in her life—for her life had this good thing in it, that it had been wonderfully free from struggle. She had been the arbiter of all things in her little world, and nobody had made any actual stand against her will. Many pretences had surrounded her, feigned assents and furtive oppositions, but nobody had stood out against her. It was a great wonder to her that he or anyone should do so now (though he did not: he had opposed her in nothing, nor ever said a word from which it could be inferred that he rejected or questioned Catherine’s sway), but with all her natural strength of mind she set herself to reconsider the question. If she disliked Hester before, if for all these years the bright-eyed, all-observant girl, mutely defiant of her, had been a sort of Mordecai to Catherine, it is not to be supposed that she could easily receive her into favour now. Her parentage, her looks, her mind, her daring setting up of her own personality as a child, as if she were something important, had all exasperated Catherine. Even the consciousness of her own prejudice, of the folly of remembering against a girl the follies of her childhood, helped to aggravate this sentiment; nor was it likely that the fact that this girl was Edward’s chosen love should make her heart softer. She said to herself that she could not endure Hester; but yet she prepared herself for the inevitable from the first day. Perhaps she thought it well to propitiate fate by going to the very furthest length at once, and forecasting all that the most evil fortune could bring her.
It cost her a sharp and painful struggle. No one knew what was going on in her mind in those wintry days of the early year: her preoccupation was attributed to other things: afterwards, when events seemed to account for it, her wonderful prevision was admired and wondered at. But in reality the previsions in Catherine’s mind were all of one kind. She saw a series of events happen in succession, as to which she was as confident as if they were past already; and in her imagination she did the only thing that nobody expected of her, the thing which fate did not demand of her—she made up her mind that she would make no stand against this hateful thing. What was the use of it? If the young but held out, even the most unwise and the most cruel, they must win in the end. It would not be for her dignity, she said to herself, to stand out. She would make no opposition to Edward’s choice. The separation that must ensue she would bear as she could—with dignity at least if nothing else. The elevation of her enemy and her enemy’s house she must submit to. She would withdraw, she would have no hand in it; but at least she would not oppose. This, by dint of a hard fight, Catherine obtained of herself. She would say nothing, forestall nothing, but at the same time oppose nothing. All the long hours which a lonely woman must spend by herself she appropriated to this. She must lose Edward; had she not lost him now? He had been her sole weakness, her one delusion; and it was not, she said to herself, a delusion—the boy had loved her and been true to her. He had made her happy like a mother with a true son. But when that vagrant sentiment comes in which is called love (the fools! as if the appropriation of the name to one kind of affection, and that the most selfish of all, was not a scorn to love, the real, the all-enduring!) what was previous virtue,
