She was really pitiable to have such a husband, and so all the world thought.  A graceful, brilliant woman, like Bertha, who smiled on morning callers, made a figure in ball-rooms, and was capable of that light repartee which, from such a woman, is accepted as wit, was secure of carrying off all sympathy from a husband who was sickly, abstracted, and, as some suspected, crack-brained.  Even the servants in our house gave her the balance of their regard and pity.  For there were no audible quarrels between us; our alienation, our repulsion from each other, lay within the silence of our own hearts; and if the mistress went out a great deal, and seemed to dislike the master’s society, was it not natural, poor thing?  The master was odd.  I was kind and just to my dependants, but I excited in them a shrinking, half-contemptuous pity; for this class of men and women are but slightly determined in their estimate of others by general considerations, or even experience, of character.  They judge of persons as they judge of coins, and value those who pass current at a high rate.

After a time I interfered so little with Bertha’s habits that it might seem wonderful how her hatred towards me could grow so intense and active as it did.  But she had begun to suspect, by some involuntary betrayal of mine, that there was an abnormal power of penetration in me—­that fitfully, at least, I was strangely cognizant of her thoughts and intentions, and she began to be haunted by a terror of me, which alternated every now and then with defiance.  She meditated continually how the incubus could be shaken off her life—­how she could be freed from this hateful bond to a being whom she at once despised as an imbecile, and dreaded as an inquisitor.  For a long while she lived in the hope that my evident wretchedness would drive me to the commission of suicide; but suicide was not in my nature.  I was too completely swayed by the sense that I was in the grasp of unknown forces, to believe in my power of self-release.  Towards my own destiny I had become entirely passive; for my one ardent desire had spent itself, and impulse no longer predominated over knowledge.  For this reason I never thought of taking any steps towards a complete separation, which would have made our alienation evident to the world.  Why should I rush for help to a new course, when I was only suffering from the consequences of a deed which had been the act of my intensest will?  That would have been the logic of one who had desires to gratify, and I had no desires.  But Bertha and I lived more and more aloof from each other.  The rich find it easy to live married and apart.