“How dare he?” she thought, and nothing else but that.  There was not one reviving touch of girlish admiration, not one thrill of self-complacent emotion, to see, what she could not help seeing, under his studiedly courteous manner, that he had forgotten, and meant her to feel he had forgotten, not a jot of the past.  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 blasé 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.  “When I am dead,” says Shakspeare’s Queen Katherine,

    "Let me be used with honor.  Strew me over
     With maiden flowers, that all the world may know
     I was a chaste wife to my grave."

But Christian thought of something beyond the world.  The ‘honor’ lay with herself alone; or, like her marriage vow, between herself, her husband, and her God.  She was conscious of no dramatic struggles of conscience, no picturesque persistence in duty:  she arrived at her end without any ethical or metaphysical reasoning, and took her course just because it seemed to her impossible there could be any other course to take.

It was a very simple one—­total passiveness and silence.  The young man could not come to the Lodge very often, even if Miss Gascoigne invited him ever so much, and was really as charmed with him as she appeared to be.  And no wonder.  He was one of those men who charm every body—­perhaps because he was not deliberately bad, else how could he have attracted Christian Oakley?  He had that rare combination of a brilliant intellect, an esthetic fancy, strong passions, and a weak moral nature, which makes some of the most dangerous and fatal characters the world ever sees.