Even to the naturalist it is annoying to have his deductions
disturbed by some unforeseen aberrancy of form or function; and how
much more so to the wife whose estimate of herself is inevitably
bound up with her judgment of her husband!
Arment's shrewdness did not, indeed, imply any latent intellectual
power; it suggested, rather, potentialities of feeling, of
suffering, perhaps, in a blind rudimentary way, on which Julia's
sensibilities naturally declined to linger. She so fully understood
her own reasons for leaving him that she disliked to think they were
not as comprehensible to her husband. She was haunted, in her
analytic moments, by the look of perplexity, too inarticulate for
words, with which he had acquiesced to her explanations.
These moments were rare with her, however. Her marriage had been too
concrete a misery to be surveyed philosophically. If she had been
unhappy for complex reasons, the unhappiness was as real as though
it had been uncomplicated. Soul is more bruisable than flesh, and
Julia was wounded in every fibre of her spirit. Her husband's
personality seemed to be closing gradually in on her, obscuring the
sky and cutting off the air, till she felt herself shut up among the
decaying bodies of her starved hopes. A sense of having been decoyed
by some world-old conspiracy into this bondage of body and soul
filled her with despair. If marriage was the slow life-long
acquittal of a debt contracted in ignorance, then marriage was a
crime against human nature.
Pages:
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173