Was that the face to be
crowned with delicate caresses and love? She scorned herself for the
moment, grew sick of herself, balked, thwarted in her true life as she
was. Other women whom God has loved enough to probe to the depths of
their nature have done the same,--saw themselves as others saw them:
their strength drying up within them, jeered at, utterly alone. It is
a trial we laugh at. I think the quick fagots at the stake were fitter
subjects for laughter than the slow gnawing hunger in the heart of many
a slighted woman or a selfish man. They come out of the trial as out of
martyrdom, according to their faith: you see its marks sometimes in a
frivolous old age going down with tawdry hopes and starved eyes to the
grave; you see its victory in the freshest, fullest lives in the earth.
This woman had accepted her trial, but she took it up as an inflexible
fate which she did not understand; it was new to her; its solitude, its
hopeless thirst were freshly bitter. She loathed herself as one whom God
had thought unworthy of every woman's right,--to love and be loved.
She went to the window, looking blankly out into the gray cold. Any
one with keen analytic eye, noting the thin muscles of this woman, the
childish, scarlet lips, the eyes deep, concealing, would have foretold
that she would conquer in the trial, that she would force her soul
down,--but that the forcing down would leave the weak, flaccid body
spent and dead.
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