“Poor Geoffrey!” she said presently, with a quick upward glance at me,—“I am sorry for you! With all my vagaries of disposition I am not a fool, and at anyrate I have learned how to analyse myself as well as others. I read you as easily as I read a book,—I see what a strange tumult your mind is in! You love me—and you loathe me!—and the contrast of emotion makes a wreck of you and your ideals. Hush,—don’t speak; I know,—I know! But what would you have me be? An angel? I cannot realize such a being for more than a fleeting moment of imagination. A saint? They were all martyred. A good woman? I never met one. Innocent?—ignorant? I told you before we married that I was neither; there is nothing left for me to discover as far as the relations between men and women are concerned,—I have taken the measure of the inherent love of vice in both sexes. There is not a pin to choose between them,—men are no worse than women,—women no worse than men. I have discovered everything—except God!—and I conclude no God could ever have designed such a crazy and mean business as human life.”
While she thus spoke, I could have fallen at her feet and implored her to be silent. For she was, unknowingly, giving utterance to some of the many thoughts in which I myself had frequently indulged,—and yet, from her lips they sounded [p 309] cruel, unnatural, and callous to a degree that made me shrink from her in fear and agony. We had reached a little grove of pines,—and here in the silence and shadow I took her in my arms and stared disconsolately upon the beauty of her face.
“Sibyl!” I whispered—“Sibyl, what is wrong with us both? How is it that we do not seem to find the loveliest side of love?—why is it that even in our kisses and embraces, some impalpable darkness comes between us, so that we anger or weary each other when we should be glad and satisfied? What is it? Can you tell? For you know the darkness is there!”
A curious look came into her eyes,—a far-away strained look of hungry yearning, mingled, as I thought, with compassion for me.
“Yes, it is there!” she answered slowly—“And it is of our own mutual creation. I believe you have something nobler in your nature, Geoffrey, than I have in mine,—an indefinable something that recoils from me and my theories despite your wish and will. Perhaps if you had given way to that feeling in time, you would never have married me. You speak of the loveliest side of love,—to me there is no lovely side,—it is all coarse and horrible! You and I for instance,—cultured man and woman,—we cannot, in marriage, get a flight beyond the common emotions of Hodge and his girl!” She laughed violently, and shuddered in my arms. “What liars the poets are, Geoffrey! They ought to be sentenced to life-long imprisonment for their perjuries! They help to mould the credulous beliefs of a woman’s heart;—in her early youth she reads their delicious assurances, and imagines that love will be all they teach,—a thing divine and lasting beyond earthly countings;—then comes the coarse finger of prose on the butterfly-wing of poesy, and the bitterness and hideousness of complete disillusion!”
I held her still in my arms with the fierce grasp of a man clinging to a spar ere he drowns in mid-ocean.
“But I love you Sibyl!——my wife, I love you!” I said, with a passion that choked my utterance.
[p 310]
“You love me,—yes, I know, but how? In a way that is abhorrent to yourself!” she replied—“It is not poetic love,—it is man’s love, and man’s love is brute love. So it is,—so it will be,—so it must be. Moreover the brute-love soon tires,—and when it dies out from satiety there is nothing left. Nothing, Geoffrey,—absolutely nothing but a blank and civil form of intercourse, which I do not doubt we shall be able to keep up for the admiration and comment of society!”
She disengaged herself from my embrace, and moved towards the house.
“Come!” she added, turning her exquisite head back over her shoulder with a feline caressing grace that she alone possessed, “You know there is a famous lady in London who advertises