ion was completely neutralized by the
presence of an absorbing feeling of another kind. I had been watching by
my father's deathbed: I had been witnessing the last fitful yearning
glance his soul had cast back on the spent inheritance of life--the last
faint consciousness of love he had gathered from the pressure of my hand.
What are all our personal loves when we have been sharing in that supreme
agony? In the first moments when we come away from the presence of
death, every other relation to the living is merged, to our feeling, in
the great relation of a common nature and a common destiny.

In that state of mind I joined Bertha in her private sitting-room. She
was seated in a leaning posture on a settee, with her back towards the
door; the great rich coils of her pale blond hair surmounting her small
neck, visible above the back of the settee. I remember, as I closed the
door behind me, a cold tremulousness seizing me, and a vague sense of
being hated and lonely--vague and strong, like a presentiment. I know
how I looked at that moment, for I saw myself in Bertha's thought as she
lifted her cutting grey eyes, and looked at me: a miserable ghost-seer,
surrounded by phantoms in the noonday, trembling under a breeze when the
leaves were still, without appetite for the common objects of human
desires, but pining after the moon-beams. We were front to front with
each other, and judged each other. The terrible moment of complete
illumination had come to me, and I saw that the darkness had hidden no
landscape from me, but only a blank prosaic wall: from that evening
forth, through the sickening years which followed, I saw all round the
narrow room of this woman's soul--saw petty artifice and mere negation
where I had delighted to believe in coy sensibilities and in wit at war
with latent feeling--saw the light floating vanities of the girl defining
themselves into the systematic coquetry, the scheming selfishness, of the
woman--saw repulsion and antipathy harden into cruel hatred, giving pain
only for the sake of wreaking itself.

For Bertha too, after her kind, felt the bitterness of disillusion. She
had believed that my wild poet's passion for her would make me her slave;
and that, being her slave, I should execute her will in all things. With
the essential shallowness of a negative, unimaginative nature, she was
unable to conceive the fact that sensibilities were anything else than
weaknesses. She had thought m