They had told almost no one in England, and fifteen years later, the “strong woman of the Westminster Review” going off with a “gallant” was still being gossiped about. When not seen as a fool she was thought a homewrecker: her brother Isaac broke with her, and many of her friends would too. Chapman wondered what he was supposed to say when people asked. “I have nothing to deny or conceal,” Evans wrote from Weimar. “I have counted the cost of the step that I have taken and am prepared to bear, without irritation or bitterness, renunciation by all my friends. I am not mistaken in the person to whom I have attached myself.” And they would be happy for more than twenty years, happier than most marriages, and happier perhaps because they weren’t yoked together by law—it was as if the choice they made every day to be together, despite the gossip, the excommunication, the cost (as Lewes still supported Agnes financially), made their not-marriage more than a marriage. She told her new London friend Barbara Bodichon—who herself was born out of wedlock—that she and Lewes had a satisfying sex life and used contraception so as not to have more children. She saw Lewes’s sons with Agnes as “our boys,” and over time all three young men became deeply attached to Evans.