here, for he had taken his way back
to England as soon as he had seen all and everything on board.
Moreover, Gwendolen herself liked the sea: it did not make her ill; and
to observe the rigging of the vessel and forecast the necessary
adjustments was a sort of amusement that might have gratified her
activity and enjoyment of imaginary rule; the weather was fine, and
they were coasting southward, where even the rain-furrowed,
heat-cracked clay becomes gem-like with purple shadows, and where one
may float between blue and blue in an open-eyed dream that the world
has done with sorrow.

But what can still that hunger of the heart which sickens the eye for
beauty, and makes sweet-scented ease an oppression? What sort of Moslem
paradise would quiet the terrible fury of moral repulsion and cowed
resistance which, like an eating pain intensifying into torture,
concentrates the mind in that poisonous misery? While Gwendolen,
throned on her cushions at evening, and beholding the glory of sea and
sky softening as if with boundless love around her, was hoping that
Grandcourt in his march up and down was not going to pause near her,
not going to look at her or speak to her, some woman, under a smoky
sky, obliged to consider the price of eggs in arranging her dinner, was
listening for the music of a footstep that would remove all risk from
her foretaste of joy; some couple, bending cheek by cheek, over a bit
of work done by the one and delighted in by the other, were reckoning
the earnings that would make them rich enough for a holiday among the
furze and heather.

Had Grandcourt the least conception of what was going on in the breast
of his wife? He conceived that she did not love him; but was that
necessary? She was under his power, and he was not accustomed to soothe
himself, as some cheerfully-disposed persons are, with the conviction
that he was very generally and justly beloved. But what lay quite away
from his conception was, that she could have any special repulsion for
him personally. How could she? He himself knew what personal repulsion
was--nobody better; his mind was much furnished with a sense of what
brutes his fellow-creatures were, both masculine and feminine; what
odious familiarities they had, what smirks, what modes of flourishing
their handkerchiefs, what costume, what lavender water, what bulging
eyes, and what foolish notions of making themselves agreeable by
remarks which were not wanted. In this critical v