Her husband!  How bitter the word grew to her!  Her husband! and him never once given, given wholly to her!  Her husband—­and in all the frenzied finality of desire, she never fully possessed him, not once.  No, not once.  As time went on, she learned it for inevitable.  Not once!

And then, how she hated him!  Cheated, foiled, betrayed, forced to love him or to hate him:  never able to be at peace near him nor away from him:  poor Lottie, no wonder she was as a mad woman.  She was strictly as a woman demented, after the birth of her second child.  For all her instinct, all her impulse, all her desire, and above all, all her will, was to possess her man in very fulness once:  just once:  and once and for all.  Once, just once:  and it would be once and for all.

But never!  Never!  Not once!  Never!  Not for one single solitary second!  Was it not enough to send a woman mad!  Was it not enough to make her demented!  Yes, and mad she was.  She made his life a hell for him.  She bit him to the bone with her frenzy of rage, chagrin, and agony.  She drove him mad, too:  mad, so that he beat her:  mad so that he longed to kill her.  But even in his greatest rages it was the same:  he never finally lost himself:  he remained, somewhere in the centre, in possession of himself.  She sometimes wished he would kill her:  or that she would kill him.  Neither event happened.

And neither of them understood what was happening.  How should they?  They were both dazed, horrified, and mortified.  He took to leaving her alone as much as was possible.  But when he had to come home, there was her terrible will, like a flat, cold snake coiled round his soul and squeezing him to death.  Yes, she did not relent.  She was a good wife and mother.  All her duties she fulfilled.  But she was not one to yield. He must yield.  That was written in eternal letters, on the iron tablet of her will. He must yield.  She the woman, the mother of his children, how should she ever even think to yield?  It was unthinkable.  He, the man, the weak, the false, the treacherous, the half-hearted, it was he who must yield.  Was not hers the divine will and the divine right?  Ha, she would be less than woman if she ever capitulated, abandoned her divine responsibility as woman!  No, he must yield.

So, he was unfaithful to her.  Piling reproach after reproach upon himself, he added adultery to his brutality.  And this was the beginning of the end.  She was more than maddened:  but he began to grow silent, unresponsive, as if he did not hear her.  He was unfaithful to her:  and oh, in such a low way.  Such shame, such shame!  But he only smiled carelessly now, and asked her what she wanted.  She had asked for all she got.  That he reiterated.  And that was all he would do.

Terrible was, that she found even his smile of insolent indifference half-beautiful.  Oh, bitter chain to bear!  But she summoned up all her strange woman’s will.  She fought against his fascination, the fascination he exerted over her.  With fearful efforts of will she fought against it, and mastered it.  And then, suddenly, horror and agony of it, up it would rush in her again, her unbearable desire for him, the longing for his contact, his quality of beauty.