She knew what was troubling him, thwarted instincts, common beautiful instincts that he was being robbed of. He wanted to do something final to prove his lower order; caught himself making faces, idiot faces, and she laughed.
"If only your ears stuck out, chin receded," she said, "you might look degenerate, common, but as it is—"
And he would creep away in hat, coat and cane to peer at his horses, never daring to go in near them. Sometimes when he wanted to weep he would smear one glove with harness grease, but the other one he held behind his back, pretending one was enough to prove his revolt.
She would torment him with vases, books, pictures, making a fool of him gently, persistently, making him doubt by cruel means, the means of objects he was not used to, eternally taking him out of his sphere.
"We have the best collection of miniatures," she would say with one knee on a low ottoman, bringing them out in her small palm.
"Here, look."
He would put his hands behind him.
"She was a great woman—Lucrezia Borgia—do you know history—" She put it back again because he did not answer, letting his mind, a curious one, torment itself.
"You love things very much, don't you?" she would question because she knew that he had a passion for one thing only. She kept placing new ladders beneath his feet, only to saw them off at the next rung, making him nothing more than a nervous irritable experiment. He was uneasy, like one given food to smell and not to taste, and for a while he had not wanted to taste, and then curiosity began, and he wanted to, and he also wanted to escape, and he could do neither.
Well, after he had married her, what then? Satisfy her whim and where would he be? He would be nothing, neither what he had been nor what other people were. This seemed to him, at times, her wish—a sort of place between lying down and standing up, a cramped position, a slow death. A curious woman.