Summarize the following text to main points and sub-points and make detailed explain for them:

property: and her opinions were always principles to be 
unwaveringly acted on. They were firm, not because of their basis, but 
because she held them with a tenacity inseparable from her mental 
action. On all the duties and proprieties of life, from filial behaviour to 
the arrangements of the evening toilette, pretty Nancy Lammeter, by the 
time she was three-and-twenty, had her unalterable little code, and had 
formed every one of her habits in strict accordance with that code. She 
carried these decided judgments within her in the most unobtrusive way: 
they rooted themselves in her mind, and grew there as quietly as grass. 
Years ago, we know, she insisted on dressing like Priscilla, because "it 
was right for sisters to dress alike", and because "she would do what was 
right if she wore a gown dyed with cheese-colouring". That was a trivial 
but typical instance of the mode in which Nancy's life was regulated. 
It was one of those rigid principles, and no petty egoistic feeling, which 
had been the ground of Nancy's difficult resistance to her husband's 
wish. To adopt a child, because children of your own had been denied 
you, was to try and choose your lot in spite of Providence: the adopted 
child, she was convinced, would never turn out well, and would be a 
curse to those who had wilfully and rebelliously sought what it was clear 
that, for some high reason, they were better without. When you saw a 
thing was not meant to be, said Nancy, it was a bounden duty to leave off 
so much as wishing for it. And so far, perhaps, the wisest of men could 
scarcely make more than a verbal improvement in her principle. But the 
conditions under which she held it apparent that a thing was not meant 
to be, depended on a more peculiar mode of thinking. She would have 
given up making a purchase at a particular place if, on three successive 
times, rain, or some other cause of Heaven's sending, had formed an 
obstacle; and she would have anticipated a broken limb or other heavy 
misfortune to any one who persisted in spite of such indications. 
"But why should you think the child would turn out ill?" said Godfrey, in 
his remonstrances. "She has thriven as well as child can do with the 
weaver; and he adopted her. There isn't such a pretty little girl anywhere 
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else in the parish, or one fitter for the station we could give her. Where 
can be the likelihood of her being a curse to anybody?" 
"Yes, my dear Godfrey," said Nancy, who was sitting with her hands 
tightly clasped together, and with yearning, regretful affection in her 
eyes. "The child may not turn out ill with the weaver. But, then, he didn't 
go to seek her, as we should be doing. It will be wrong: I feel sure it will. 
Don't you remember what that lady we met at the Royston Baths told us 
about the child her sister adopted? That was the only adopting I ever 
heard of: and the child was transported when it was twenty-three. Dear 
Godfrey, don't ask me to do what I know is wrong: I should never be 
happy again. I know it's very hard for you—it's easier for me—but it's the 
will of Providence." 
It might seem singular that Nancy—with her religious theory pieced 
together out of narrow social traditions, fragments of church doctrine 
imperfectly understood, and girlish reasonings on her small experience—
should have arrived by herself at a way of thinking so nearly akin to that 
of many devout people, whose beliefs are held in the shape of a system 
quite remote from her knowledge—singular, if we did not know that 
human beliefs, like all other natural growths, elude the barriers of 
system. 
Godfrey had from the first specified Eppie, then about twelve years old, 
as a child suitable for them to adopt. It had never occurred to him that 
Silas would rather part with his life than with Eppie. Surely the weaver 
would wish the best to the child he had taken so much trouble with, and 
would be glad that such good fortune should happen to her: she would 
always be very grateful to him, and he would be well provided for to the 
end of his life—provided for as the excellent part he had done by the 
child deserved. Was it not an appropriate thing for people in a higher 
station to take a charge off the hands of a man in a lower? It seemed an 
eminently appropriate thing to Godfrey, for reasons that were known 
only to himself; and by a common fallacy, he imagined the measure 
would be easy because he had private motives for desiring it. This was 
rather a coarse mode of estimating Silas's relation to Eppie; but we must 
remember that many of the impressions which Godfrey was likely to 
gather concerning the labouring people around him would favour the 
idea that deep affections can hardly go along with callous palms and 
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scant means; and he had not had the opportunity, even if he had had the 
power, of entering intimately into all that was exceptional in the weaver's 
experience. It was only the want of adequate knowledge that could have 
made it possible for Godfrey deliberately to entertain an unfeeling 
project: his natural kindness had outlived that blighting time of cruel 
wishes, and Nancy's praise of him as a husband was not founded entirely 
on a wilful illusion. 
"I was right," she said to herself, when she had recalled all their scenes of 
discussion—"I feel I was right to say him nay, though it hurt me more 
than anything; but how good Godfrey has been about it! Many men 
would have been very angry with me for standing out against their 
wishes; and they might have thrown out that they'd had ill-luck in 
marrying me; but Godfrey has never been the man to say me an unkind 
word. It's only what he can't hide: everything seems so blank to him, I 
know; and the land—what a difference it 'ud make to him, when he goes 
to see after things, if he'd children growing up that he was doing it all for! 
But I won't murmur; and perhaps if he'd married a woman who'd have 
had children, she'd have vexed him in other ways." 
This possibility was Nancy's chief comfort; and to give it greater 
strength, she laboured to make it impossible that any other wife should 
have had more perfect tenderness. She had been forced to vex him by 
that one denial. Godfrey was not insensible to her loving effort, and did 
Nancy no injustice as to the motives of her obstinacy. It was impossible 
to have lived with her fifteen years and not be aware that an unselfish 
clinging to the right, and a sincerity clear as the flower-born dew, were 
her main characteristics; indeed, Godfrey felt this so strongly, that his 
own more wavering nature, too averse to facing difficulty to be 
unvaryingly simple and truthful, was kept in a certain awe of this gentle 
wife who watched his looks with a yearning to obey them. It seemed to 
him impossible that he should ever confess to her the truth about Eppie: 
she would never recover from the repulsion the story of his earlier 
marriage would create, told to her now, after that long concealment. And 
the child, too, he thought, must become an object of repulsion: the very 
sight of her would be painful. The shock to Nancy's mingled pride and 
ignorance of the world's evil might even be too much for her delicate 
frame. Since he had married her with that secret on his heart, he must 
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keep it there to the last. Whatever else he did, he could not make an 
irreparable breach between himself and this long-loved wife. 
Meanwhile, why could he not make up his mind to the absence of 
children from a hearth brightened by such a wife? Why did his mind fly 
uneasily to that void, as if it were the sole reason why life was not 
thoroughly joyous to him? I suppose it is the way with all men and 
women who reach middle age without the clear perception that life 
never can be thoroughly joyous: under the vague dullness of the grey 
hours, dissatisfaction seeks a definite object, and finds it in the privation 
of an untried good. Dissatisfaction seated musingly on a childless hearth, 
thinks with envy of the father whose return is greeted by young voices—
seated at the meal where the little heads rise one above another like 
nursery plants, it sees a black care hovering behind every one of them, 
and thinks the impulses by which men abandon freedom, and seek for 
ties, are surely nothing but a brief madness. In Godfrey's case there were 
further reasons why his thoughts should be continually solicited by this 
one point in his lot: his conscience, never thoroughly easy about Eppie, 
now gave his childless home the aspect of a retribution; and as the time 
passed on, under Nancy's refusal to adopt her, any retrieval of his error 
became more and more difficult. 
On this Sunday afternoon it was already four years since there had been 
any allusion to the subject between them, and Nancy supposed that it 
was for ever buried. 
"I wonder if he'll mind it less or more as he gets older," she thought; "I'm 
afraid more. Aged people feel the miss of children: what would 

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