In WB Maxwell’s Mrs Thompson (1911), there’s this beautiful description of how a woman discovers that she missed her period:
As she lay in bed one morning after a night of dreamless sleep, a chance word dropped by Yates set her lazily thinking of the last date on which she had suffered from those normal and not accidental fluctuations of energy that are produced by periodically recurrent causes.
And then when she suspects that she might be pregnant:
Her heart was overflowing with a joy such as she had thought she could never feel again. And with the warm stream of bliss there were gushing fountains of gratitude. She will forgive her husband everything, because he has crowned her life with this ineffable glory. . . Even in the brightly coloured dreams from which realities had so rudely awakened her, she was not advancing towards so triumphant an apotheosis.
Yes, it’s very bombastic and massively wordy. But it’s also quite touching.
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