But she had to let him talk on
and on, and yet on. In due season, when she was ready to speak and
he to hear, she would disclose to him the future she had mapped
out for him, not before. He discoursed; she listened. At intervals
he made love in his violent, terrifying way; she endured, now
half-liking it, now half-hating it and him, but always enduring,
passive, as became a modest, inexperienced maiden, and with never
a suggestion of her real thoughts upon her surface.
It was the morning after one of these outbursts of his, one of
unusual intensity, one that had so worn upon her nerves that, all
but revolted by the sense of sick satiety, she had come perilously
near to indulging herself in the too costly luxury of telling him
precisely what she thought of him and his conduct. She was in bed,
with the blinds just up, and the fair, early-summer world
visioning itself to her sick heart like Paradise to the excluded
Peri at its barred gate. "And if he had given me half a chance I'd
have loved him," she was thinking. "I do believe in him, and
admire his strength and his way of never accepting defeat. But how
can I--how CAN I--when he makes me the victim of these ruffian
moods of his? I almost think the Frenchman was right who said that
every man ought to have two wives.
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