his soul had cast back on the spent inheritance of life—­the last faint consciousness of love he had gathered from the pressure of my hand.  What are all our personal loves when we have been sharing in that supreme agony?  In the first moments when we come away from the presence of death, every other relation to the living is merged, to our feeling, in the great relation of a common nature and a common destiny.

In that state of mind I joined Bertha in her private sitting-room.  She was seated in a leaning posture on a settee, with her back towards the door; the great rich coils of her pale blond hair surmounting her small neck, visible above the back of the settee.  I remember, as I closed the door behind me, a cold tremulousness seizing me, and a vague sense of being hated and lonely—­vague and strong, like a presentiment.  I know how I looked at that moment, for I saw myself in Bertha’s thought as she lifted her cutting grey eyes, and looked at me:  a miserable ghost-seer, surrounded by phantoms in the noonday, trembling under a breeze when the leaves were still, without appetite for the common objects of human desires, but pining after the moon-beams.  We were front to front with each other, and judged each other.  The terrible moment of complete illumination had come to me, and I saw that the darkness had hidden no landscape from me, but only a blank prosaic wall:  from that evening forth, through the sickening years which followed, I saw all round the narrow room of this woman’s soul—­saw petty artifice and mere negation where I had delighted to believe in coy sensibilities and in wit at war with latent feeling—­saw the light floating vanities of the girl defining themselves into the systematic coquetry, the scheming selfishness, of the woman—­saw repulsion and antipathy harden into cruel hatred, giving pain only for the sake of wreaking itself.

For Bertha too, after her kind, felt the bitterness of disillusion.  She had believed that my wild poet’s passion for her would make me her slave; and that, being her slave, I should execute her will in all things.  With the essential shallowness of a negative, unimaginative nature, she was unable to conceive the fact that sensibilities were anything else than weaknesses.  She had thought my weaknesses would put me in her power, and she found them unmanageable forces.  Our positions were reversed.  Before marriage she had completely mastered my imagination, for she was a secret to me; and I created the unknown thought before which I trembled as if it were hers.  But now that her soul was laid open to me, now that I was compelled to share the privacy of her motives, to follow all the petty devices that preceded her words and acts, she found herself powerless with me, except to produce in me the chill shudder of repulsion—­ powerless, because I could be acted on by no lever within her reach.  I was dead to worldly ambitions, to social vanities, to all the incentives within the compass of her narrow imagination, and I lived under influences utterly invisible to her.