but his heart is not on his lips when he kisses me now; his
hand tells me nothing when it touches mine. Day after day the hours that
he gives to his hateful writing grow longer and longer; day after day he
becomes more and more silent in the hours that he gives to me.

"And, with all this, there is nothing that I can complain of--nothing
marked enough to justify me in noticing it. His disappointment shrinks
from all open confession; his resignation collects itself by such fine
degrees that even my watchfulness fails to see the growth of it. Fifty
times a day I feel the longing in me to throw my arms round his neck,
and say: 'For God's sake, do anything to me, rather than treat me like
this!' and fifty times a day the words are forced back into my heart by
the cruel considerateness of his conduct; which gives me no excuse for
speaking them. I thought I had suffered the sharpest pain that I could
feel when my first husband laid his whip across my face. I thought I
knew the worst that despair could do on the day when I knew that the
other villain, the meaner villain still, had cast me off. Live and
learn. There is sharper pain than I felt under Waldron's whip; there is
bitterer despair than the despair I knew when Manuel deserted me.

"Am I too old for him? Surely not yet! Have I lost my beauty? Not a man
passes me in the street but his eyes tell me I am as handsome as ever.

"Ah, no! no! the secret lies deeper than _that_! I have thought and
thought about it till a horrible fancy has taken possession of me. He
has been noble and good in his past life, and I have been wicked and
disgraced. Who can tell what a gap that dreadful difference may make
between us, unknown to him and unknown to me? It is folly, it is
madness; but, when I lie awake by him in the darkness, I ask myself
whether any unconscious disclosure of the truth escapes me in the close
intimacy that now unites us? Is there an unutterable Something left by
the horror of my past life, which clings invisibly to me still? And is
he feeling the influence of it, sensibly, and yet incomprehensibly to
himself? Oh me! is there no purifying power in such love as mine?
Are there plague-spots of past wickedness on my heart which no
after-repentance can wash out?

"Who can tell? There is something wrong in our married life--I can only
come back to that. There is some adverse influence that neither he nor I
can trace which is parting us further and further from each other