"So you chose to pass your summer in a village?" he presently said, in the tone of a man who has ceased to rule, but not ceased to criticise. "I hope you liked it."
"I told you in my letters that I liked it," she replied in an expressionless monotone.
"And I told you in my letters that I did not like it. It would have been more decent in you to stay in Portland, among the people whom I had requested to take care of you. However, you are accustomed to have your own way. I can only observe that when a woman will have her own way, she ought to pay her own way."
A flush, perhaps of shame, perhaps of irritation, crossed her hitherto pale face, but she made no response to the scoff, and continued to look at the floor.
After a few seconds, during which neither of them broke the silence, she seemed to understand that the reproof was over, and she quietly quitted the room.
The man pushed the door to violently with his foot, and said in an accent of angry scorn, "That is what is now called a wife."
Well, we have reached the mystery: we have found that it was a crime.
In the working of social laws there occur countless cases of individual hardship. The institution of marriage is as beneficent as the element of fire; yet, like that, it sometimes tortures when it should only have comforted.
The sufferer, if a woman, usually bears her smart tamely--with more or less domestic fretting and private weeping indeed, but without violent effort to escape from her bed of embers. Divorce is public, ugly and brutal: her sensibility revolts from it. Moreover, mere unhappiness, mere disappointment of the affections, does not establish a claim for legal separation. Finally, there is woman's difficulty of self-maintenance--the fact that her labor will not in general give her both comfort and position.
What then? Unloved, unable to love, yet with an intense desire for affection, and an immense capacity for granting it, her heart is tempted to wander beyond the circle of her duty. A flattering shape approaches her dungeon-walls; a voice calls to her to come forth and be glad, if only for a moment; there seems to be a chance of winning the adoration which has been her whole life's desire; there is an opportunity of using the emotions which are burning within her. Shall she burst open the gate on which is written LEGALITY?