Sometimes, after months of this intensity, a sense of burden overcame
Isabel, a weariness, a terrible _ennui_, in that silent house approached
between a colonnade of tall-shafted pines. Then she felt she would go
mad, for she could not bear it. And sometimes he had devastating fits of
depression, which seemed to lay waste his whole being. It was worse than
depression--a black misery, when his own life was a torture to him, and
when his presence was unbearable to his wife. The dread went down to the
roots of her soul as these black days recurred. In a kind of panic she
tried to wrap herself up still further in her husband. She forced the old
spontaneous cheerfulness and joy to continue. But the effort it cost her
was almost too much. She knew she could not keep it up. She felt she
would scream with the strain, and would give anything, anything, to
escape. She longed to possess her husband utterly; it gave her inordinate
joy to have him entirely to herself. And yet, when again he was gone in a
black and massive misery, she could not bear him, she could not bear
herself; she wished she could be snatched away off the earth altogether,
anything rather than live at this cost.
Dazed, she schemed for a way out. She invited friends, she tried to give
him some further connexion with the outer world. But it was no good.
After all their joy and suffering, after their dark, great year of
blindness and solitude and unspeakable nearness, other people seemed to
them both shallow, prattling, rather impertinent.
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