is eyes. At
dinner he would remark that the fruit was getting stale, and they must
put in somewhere for more; or, observing that she did not drink the
wine, he asked her if she would like any other kind better. A lady was
obliged to respond to these things suitably; and even if she had not
shrunk from quarrelling on other grounds, quarreling with Grandcourt
was impossible; she might as well have made angry remarks to a
dangerous serpent ornamentally coiled in her cabin without invitation.
And what sort of dispute could a woman of any pride and dignity begin
on a yacht?

Grandcourt had intense satisfaction in leading his wife captive after
this fashion; it gave their life on a small scale a royal
representation and publicity in which every thing familiar was got rid
of, and every body must do what was expected of them whatever might be
their private protest--the protest (kept strictly private) adding to
the piquancy of despotism.

To Gwendolen, who even in the freedom of her maiden time, had had very
faint glimpses of any heroism or sublimity, the medium that now thrust
itself everywhere before her view was this husband and her relation to
him. The beings closest to us, whether in love or hate, are often
virtually our interpreters of the world, and some feather-headed
gentleman or lady whom in passing we regret to take as legal tender for
a human being, may be acting as a melancholy theory of life in the
minds of those who live with them--like a piece of yellow and wavy
glass that distorts form and makes color an affliction. Their trivial
sentences, their petty standards, their low suspicions, their loveless
_ennui_, may be making somebody else's life no better than a promenade
through a pantheon of ugly idols. Gwendolen had that kind of window
before her, affecting the distant equally with the near. Some unhappy
wives are soothed by the possibility that they may become mothers; but
Gwendolen felt that to desire a child for herself would have been a
consenting to the completion of the injury she had been guilty of. She
was reduced to dread lest she should become a mother. It was not the
image of a new sweetly-budding life that came as a vision of
deliverance from the monotony of distaste: it was an image of another
sort. In the irritable, fluctuating stages of despair, gleams of hope
came in the form of some possible accident. To dwell on the benignity
of accident was a refuge from worse temptation.

The embitterment