creaking stairs; he was gone. She went to the window and threw it
open, as if to get rid of the atmosphere charged with his presence,--a
presence still so potent that she now knew that for the last five
minutes she had been, to her horror, struggling against its magnetism.
She even recoiled now at the thought of her child, as if, in these new
confidences over it, it had revived the old intimacy in this link
of their common flesh. She looked down from her window on the square
shoulders, thick throat, and crisp matted hair of her husband as he
vanished in the darkness, and drew a breath of freedom,--a freedom not
so much from him as from her own weakness that he was bearing away with
him into the exonerating night.
She shut the window and sank down in her chair again, but in the
encompassing and compassionate obscurity of the room. And this was the
man she had loved and for whom she had wrecked her young life! Or WAS
it love? and, if NOT, how was she better than he? Worse; for he was
more loyal to that passion that had brought them together and its
responsibilities than she was. She had suffered the perils and pangs of
maternity, and yet had only the mere animal yearning for her offspring,
while he had taken over the toil and duty, and even the devotion, of
parentage himself. But then she remembered also how he had fascinated
her--a simple schoolgirl--by his sheer domineering strength, and how the
objections of her parents to this coarse and common man had forced her
into a clandestine intimacy that ended in her complete subjection to
him. She remembered the birth of an infant whose concealment from her
parents and friends was compassed by his low cunning; she remembered the
late atonement of marriage preferred by the man she had already begun
to loathe and fear, and who she now believed was eager only for her
inheritance. She remembered her abject compliance through the greater
fear of the world, the stormy scenes that followed their ill-omened
union, her final abandonment of her husband, and the efforts of her
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