kissed each other.

Deronda did not know how he got out of the room. He felt an older man.
All his boyish yearnings and anxieties about his mother had vanished.
He had gone through a tragic experience which must forever solemnize
his life and deepen the significance of the acts by which he bound
himself to others.

CHAPTER LIV.

"The unwilling brain
Feigns often what it would not; and we trust
Imagination with such phantasies
As the tongue dares not fashion into words;
Which have no words, their horror makes them dim
To the mind's eye."
--SHELLEY.

Madonna Pia, whose husband, feeling himself injured by her, took her to
his castle amid the swampy flats of the Maremma and got rid of her
there, makes a pathetic figure in Dante's Purgatory, among the sinners
who repented at the last and desire to be remembered compassionately by
their fellow-countrymen. We know little about the grounds of mutual
discontent between the Siennese couple, but we may infer with some
confidence that the husband had never been a very delightful companion,
and that on the flats of the Maremma his disagreeable manners had a
background which threw them out remarkably; whence in his desire to
punish his wife to the unmost, the nature of things was so far against
him that in relieving himself of her he could not avoid making the
relief mutual. And thus, without any hardness to the poor Tuscan lady,
who had her deliverance long ago, one may feel warranted in thinking of
her with a less sympathetic interest than of the better known Gwendolen
who, instead of being delivered from her errors or earth and cleansed
from their effect in purgatory, is at the very height of her
entanglement in those fatal meshes which are woven within more closely
than without, and often make the inward torture disproportionate to
what is discernable as outward cause.

In taking his wife with him on a yachting expedition, Grandcourt had no
intention to get rid of her; on the contrary, he wanted to feel more
securely that she was his to do as he liked with, and to make her feel
it also. Moreover, he was himself very fond of yachting: its dreamy
do-nothing absolutism, unmolested by social demands, suited his
disposition, and he did not in the least regard it as an equivalent for
the dreariness of the Maremma. He had his reasons for carrying
Gwendolen out of reach, but they were not reasons that can seem bl