Pride and Desperate Measures — North and South

Margaret returns home from Boucher's house carrying the accumulated weight of the day: the suicide, the widow's breakdown, and her own private guilt about the lie she told Thornton. In the quiet of the house she allows herself the bare judgement, guilty of it, without softening. She wonders, honestly, whether she would have cared as much about Thornton's knowledge of her dishonesty if it had been any other person who discovered it. The answer is that she would not. The chapter moves between Margaret's private moral reckoning and the social surface she must maintain. Dixon, protective and slightly aggrieved, manages the domestic life. Hale is absent in his grief. Margaret corresponds with Frederick and maintains the household routine that is the only structure available to her. Near the chapter's close, Higgins speaks the novel's central reconciling observation: North and South have each got their own troubles. The line comes from a man who has spent the novel in opposition to everything the Hales represent, and its placement after the day's multiple disasters gives it the weight of experience rather than sentiment. Margaret, writing to Frederick, wishes Thornton would come so that she could at least know the full extent of his contempt and be done with the uncertainty.