of hatred is often as unaccountable to onlookers as
the growth of devoted love, and it not only seems but is really out of
direct relation with any outward causes to be alleged. Passion is of
the nature of seed, and finds nourishment within, tending to a
predominance which determines all currents toward itself, and makes the
whole life its tributary. And the intensest form of hatred is that
rooted in fear, which compels to silence and drives vehemence into a
constructive vindictiveness, an imaginary annihilation of the detested
object, something like the hidden rites of vengeance with which the
persecuted have made a dark vent for their rage, and soothed their
suffering into dumbness. Such hidden rites went on in the secrecy of
Gwendolen's mind, but not with soothing effect--rather with the effect
of a struggling terror. Side by side with the dread of her husband had
grown the self-dread, which urged her to flee from the pursuing images
wrought by her pent-up impulse. The vision of her past wrong-doing, and
what it had brought on her, came with a pale ghastly illumination over
every imagined deed that was a rash effort at freedom, such as she had
made in her marriage. Moreover, she had learned to see all her acts
through the impression they would make on Deronda: whatever relief
might come to her, she could not sever it from the judgment of her that
would be created in his mind. Not one word of flattery, of indulgence,
of dependence on her favor, could be fastened on by her in all their
intercourse, to weaken his restraining power over her (in this way
Deronda's effort over himself was repaid); and amid the dreary
uncertainties of her spoiled life the possible remedies that lay in his
mind, nay, the remedy that lay in her feeling for him, made her only
hope. He seemed to her a terrible-browed angel, from whom she could not
think of concealing any deed so as to win an ignorant regard from him:
it belonged to the nature of their relation that she should be
truthful, for his power over her had begun in the raising of a
self-discontent which could be satisfied only by genuine change. But in
no concealment had she now any confidence: her vision of what she had
to dread took more decidedly than ever the form of some fiercely
impulsive deed, committed as in a dream that she would instantaneously
wake from to find the effects real though the images had been false: to
find death under her hands, but instead of darkness, daylight;