A Reconstructed Marriage

Chapter 30: OTHER BOOKS BY MRS. BARR

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About This Book

The narrative follows an English schoolteacher whose engagement to the son of a well-established household provokes a determined and scheming prospective mother-in-law. It chronicles wedding preparations, the bride's uneasy homecoming, escalating domestic rivalries and a runaway episode, then follows the woman's attempts to rebuild a life amid hostility. Interlaced scenes address questions of class and temperament, naming and child-rearing, shifting loyalties among sisters, and the husband's attempts at reconciliation. The plot concludes with gradual adaptations and compromises that reshape domestic roles and produce a reconstructed marriage.

"Had worked their pleasure out of pain,
And out of ruin golden gain."

And as they talked in the splendid room, with its sweet odors and dim light, their voices grew lower, and they were content to whisper each other's names, and fall into sweet silences, thrilled with such soft stir, as angels in their cloud-girt wayfarings know, when they "feel the breath of kindred plumes." And thus,

"The tumult of the time disconsolate,
To inarticulate murmurs died away."