"You are a pretty simpleton, to set up your opinion against that of all civilized society!" was the response of incarnate Reason.
From that moment she trembled at her danger, and quivered under the remorse which terror brings. At times she thought of flying, of abandoning the husband who did not love her for the one who did; but she was afraid of being pursued, afraid of discovery. The knowledge that society had already passed judgment upon her made her see herself in the new light of a criminal, friendless, hunted and doomed. The penalty of her illegal grasp after happiness was already tracking her like a bloodhound.
Yet when she further learned that her second marriage was not binding because of the first, her heart rose in mutiny. Faithful to the only love that there had been for her in the world, she repeated to herself, a hundred times a day, "It is binding--it is!"
She was in dark insurrection against her kind; at times she was on the point of bursting out into open defiance. She stared at Duvernois, crazy to tell him, "I am wedded to another."
He noticed the wild expression, the longing, wide-open eyes, the parted and eager lips, the trembling chin. At last he said, with a brutality which had become customary with him, "What are you putting on those airs for? I suppose you are imagining yourself the heroine of a romance."
With a glare of pain and scorn she walked away from him in silence.
It is shocking indeed to be fastened speechless upon a rack, and to be charged by uncomprehending souls with counterfeiting emotion. She was so constituted that she could not help laying up this speech of her husband's against him as one of many stolid misdoings which justified both contempt and aversion. In fact, his inability or unwillingness to comprehend her had always been, in her searching and sensitive eyes, his chief crime. To be understood, to be accepted at her full worth, was one of the most urgent demands of her nature.
The life of this young woman, not only within but without, was strange indeed. She fulfilled that problem of Hawthorne's--an individual bearing one character, living one life in one place, and a totally different one in another place--upon one spot of earth angelic, and upon another vile.
Stranger still, her harsher qualities appeared where her manner of life was lawful, and her finer ones where it was condemnable. At Northport she had been like sunlight to her intimates and like a ministering seraph to the poor. In New York she avoided society: she had no tenderness for misery.
The explanation seems to be that love was her only motive of feeling and action. Not a creature of reason, not a creature of conscience--she was only a creature of emotion, an exaggerated woman.