“Shadows remind me of Midwinter; or, if the shadows don’t, something else does. I must have another look at his letter, and then I will positively go to bed.
“I shall end in getting fond of him. If I remain much longer in this lonely uncertain state—so irresolute, so unlike my usual self—I shall end in getting fond of him. What madness! As if I could ever be really fond of a man again!
“Suppose I took one of my sudden resolutions, and married him. Poor as he is, he would give me a name and a position if I became his wife. Let me see how the name—his own name—would look, if I really did consent to it for mine.
“‘Mrs. Armadale!’ Pretty.
“‘Mrs. Allan Armadale!’ Prettier still.
“My nerves must be shaken. Here is my own handwriting startling me now! It is so strange; it is enough to startle anybody. The similarity in the two names never struck me in this light before. Marry which of the two I might, my name would, of course, be the same. I should have been Mrs. Armadale, if I had married the light-haired Allan at the great house. And I can be Mrs. Armadale still, if I marry the dark-haired Allan in London. It’s almost maddening to write it down—to feel that something ought to come of it—and to find nothing come.
“How can anything come of it? If I did go to London, and marry him (as of course I must marry him) under his real name, would he let me be known by it afterward? With all his reasons for concealing his real name, he would insist—no, he is too fond of me to do that—he would entreat me to take the name which he has assumed. Mrs. Midwinter. Hideous! Ozias, too, when I wanted to address him familiarly, as his wife should. Worse than hideous!
“And yet there would be some reason for humoring him in this if he asked me.
“Suppose the brute at the great house happened to leave this neighborhood as a single man; and suppose, in his absence, any of the people who know him heard of a Mrs. Allan Armadale, they would set her down at once as his wife. Even if they actually saw me—if I actually came among them with that name, and if he was not present to contradict it—his own servants would be the first to say, ‘We knew she would marry him, after all!’ And my lady-patronesses, who will be ready to believe anything of me now we have quarreled, would join the chorus sotto voce: ‘Only think, my dear, the report that so shocked us actually turns out to be true!’ No. If I marry Midwinter, I must either be perpetually putting my husband and myself in a false position—or I must leave his real name, his pretty, romantic name, behind me at the church door.
“My husband! As if I was really going to marry him! I am not going to marry him, and there’s an end of it.