"I have been told that before."
"It was not a complaint," said Mrs. Trant, and went back to the linen.
Hannah met the county properly in the fourth week, at church, and found she had not prepared enough for it. There were about nine people who spoke to her in the churchyard afterward, and every single one of them was pleasant. That was what she had not been ready for. She had braced for a cut, for four women turning their backs, for somebody saying a thing she could repeat to herself afterward and be angry about. And what she got was a quarter of an hour of warm, careful, entirely correct conversation, conducted by people who had settled the whole question of Hannah Sedge before she had got out of the carriage.
A woman of about fifty said she was sure Her Grace would find the county very quiet after Bath. Hannah, who had been in Bath four days in her life, and had slept two of those nights in a lodging house at sixpence, said that she thought she should like the quiet.
Another said, with a great deal of warmth, that it was such a comfort to know His Grace had somebody with him now.
And the rector's wife, who was kind and meant it, and had not the smallest idea what she was doing, pressed Hannah's hand at the gate and said, "My dear, you must not let them tire you. You have taken on a great deal."
Hannah Sedge worked at that sentence for about four miles in the carriage: You have taken on a great deal. It was perfectly true. She had married a dying man in nine days off his own doorstep, and every soul in that churchyard knew it, and not one of them had said one unkind word. And what the whole quarter of an hour had actually said underneath, in the pleasantest possible voices, was: We know exactly what you are and what you have done and why, and we shall be extremely nice to you about it for the rest of your life, and you will never once be able to answer it because nobody will ever say it.
She wrote it down that night in four lines, and then sat looking at it:
I have been in this county four weeks, and I have been condemned in a churchyard by nine people who were smiling at me, and the worst of it is that they are half right. I did marry him for a roof, and I said so to his face in his own library, and there is not one thing they think about me that I could stand up and deny. So I shall not deny any of it. I shall simply be here in nine years, and in nineteen, and let them look at that instead.