forgot everything but that he loved her; and the next week they were
married.

Here, by every law of custom, ought my weary pen to fall flat and refuse
its office; for it is here that the fate of every heroine culminates.
For what are women born but to be married? Old maids are excrescences in
the social system,--disagreeable utilities,--persons who have failed to
fulfil their destiny,--and of whom it should have been said, rather than
of ghosts, that they are always in the wrong. But life, with
pertinacious facts, is too apt to transcend custom and the usage of
novel-writers; and though the one brings a woman's legal existence to an
end when she merges her independence in that of a man, and the other
curtails her historic existence at the same point, because the
novelist's catechism hath for its preface this creed,--"The chief end of
woman is to get married"; still, neither law nor novelists altogether
displace this same persistent fact, and a woman lives, in all capacities
of suffering and happiness, not only her wonted, but a double life, when
legally and religiously she binds herself with bond and vow to another
soul.

Happy would it have been for Hitty Hyde, if with the legal fiction had
chimed the actual existent fact!--happy indeed for Abner Dimock's wife
to have laid her new joy down at the altar, and been carried to sleep by
her mother under the mulleins and golden-rods on Greenfield Hill! Scarce
was the allotted period of rapture past half its term, scarce had she
learned to phrase the tender words aloud that her heart beat and choked
with, before Abner Dimock began to tire of his incumbrance, and to
invent plans and excuses for absence; for he dared not openly declare as
yet that he left his patient, innocent wife for such scenes of vice and
reckless dissipation as she had not even dreamed could exist.