The misfortune was that she had been too much reduced to the state of a machine ; that no one had cared about her (except the children) or taken any individual interest in her, and that thus her mind had been tempted to turn with morbid regret towards the past, in which there had been at least some one to love her, some one to show her some sort of sympathy.
69 there had been nothing to draw her back, in the four quiet prosaic years she had passed beneath his roof.  The misfortune was that she had been too much reduced to the state of a machine ; that no one had cared about her (except the children) or taken any individual interest in her, and that thus her mind had been tempted to turn with morbid regret towards the past, in which there had been at least some one to love her, some one to show her some sort of sympathy.  Her father and Fabian — she had found nothing to replace them, capricious and selfish though their affection had been ; and till Mr. Bartram came she had not even supposed it possible that she could ever have a real friend — a friend of her own — again.