her love was all-beneficent.  Of this no shadow of doubt.  She was quite sure that the highest her man could ever know or ever reach, was to be perfectly enveloped in her all-beneficent love.  This was her idea of marriage.  She held it not as an idea, but as a profound impulse and instinct:  an instinct developed in her by the age in which she lived.  All that was deepest and most sacred in he feeling centred in this belief.

And he outraged her!  Oh, from the first day and the first night, she felt he outraged her.  True, for some time she had been taken in by his manifest love.  But though you can deceive the conscious mind, you can never deceive the deep, unconscious instinct.  She could never understand whence arose in her, almost from the first days of marriage with him, her terrible paroxysms of hatred for him.  She was in love with him:  ah, heaven, how maddeningly she was in love with him:  a certain unseizable beauty that was his, and which fascinated her as a snake a bird.  But in revulsion, how she hated him!  How she abhorred him!  How she despised and shuddered at him!  He seemed a horrible thing to her.

And then again, oh, God, the agony of her desire for him.  The agony of her long, long desire for him.  He was a passionate lover.  He gave her, ostensibly, all she asked for.  He withheld from her nothing, no experience, no degree of intimacy.  She was his initiate, or he hers.

And yet, oh, horror for a woman, he withheld everything from her.  He withheld the very centre of himself.  For a long time, she never realised.  She was dazed and maddened only.  But as months of married experience passed into years of married torment, she began to understand.  It was that, after their most tremendous, and, it seemed to her, heaven-rending passion—­yea, when for her every veil seemed rent and a terrible and sacred creative darkness covered the earth—­ then—­after all this wonder and miracle—­in crept a poisonous grey snake of disillusionment, a poisonous grey snake of disillusion that bit her to madness, so that she really was a mad woman, demented.

Why?  Why?  He never gave himself.  He never came to her, really.  He withheld himself.  Yes, in those supreme and sacred times which for her were the whole culmination of life and being, the ecstasy of unspeakable passional conjunction, he was not really hers.  He was withheld.  He withheld the central core of himself, like the devil and hell-fiend he was.  He cheated and made play with her tremendous passional soul, her sacred sex passion, most sacred of all things for a woman.  All the time, some central part of him stood apart from her, aside, looking on.

Oh, agony and horror for a passionate, fierce-hearted woman!  She who loved him.  She who loved him to madness.  She who would have died for him.  She who did die with him, many terrible and magnificent connubial deaths, in his arms, her husband.