ot know it. He started
off on the good old tack of worshipping his woman while his heart was
honest, and profaning her in his fits of temper and revolt. But he made
a bad show. Born in him was a spirit which could not worship woman:
no, and would not. Could not and would not. It was not in him. In early
days, he tried to pretend it was in him. But through his plaintive and
homage-rendering love of a young husband was always, for the woman,
discernible the arrogance of self-unyielding male. He never yielded
himself: never. All his mad loving was only an effort. Afterwards, he
was as devilishly unyielded as ever. And it was an instinct in her, that
her man must yield to her, so that she should envelop him yielding,
in her all-beneficent love. She was quite sure that her love was
all-beneficent. Of this no shadow of doubt. She was quite sure that
the highest her man could ever know or ever reach, was to be perfectly
enveloped in her all-beneficent love. This was her idea of marriage.
She held it not as an idea, but as a profound impulse and instinct: an
instinct developed in her by the age in which she lived. All that was
deepest and most sacred in he feeling centred in this belief.

And he outraged her! Oh, from the first day and the first night, she
felt he outraged her. True, for some time she had been taken in by his
manifest love. But though you can deceive the conscious mind, you can
never deceive the deep, unconscious instinct. She could never understand
whence arose in her, almost from the first days of marriage with him,
her terrible paroxysms of hatred for him. She was in love with him: ah,
heaven, how maddeningly she was in love with him: a certain unseizable
beauty that was his, and which fascinated her as a snake a bird. But in
revulsion, how she hated him! How she abhorred him! How she despised and
shuddered at him! He seemed a horrible thing to her.

And then again, oh, God, the agony of her desire for him. The agony of
her long, long desire for him. He was a passionate lover. He gave
her, ostensibly, all she asked for. He withheld from her nothing, no
experience, no degree of intimacy. She was his initiate, or he hers.

And yet, oh, horror for a woman, he withheld everything from her.
He withheld the very centre of himself. For a long time, she never
realised. She was dazed and maddened only. But as months of married
experience passed into years of married torment, she began to
understand. It was that, af