lame" was unmeaning in such reference. In this, at
all events, his fatalism had become her own way of thinking. To talk of
controlling love is nonsensical; dead love is dead beyond hope. But
need one sink into a slough of vileness?

At midnight she went to her bedroom. He would not come now.

Sleep seemed far from her, and yet before the clock struck one she had
fallen into a painful slumber. When she awoke, it was to toss and
writhe for hours in uttermost misery. She could neither sleep nor
command a train of thoughts. At times she sobbed and wailed in her
suffering.

No letter arrived in the morning. She could no longer read, and knew
not how to pass the hours. In some way she must put an end to her
intolerable loneliness, but she could not decide how to act. Reuben
might come today; she wished it, that the meeting might be over and
done with.

But the long torment of her nerves had caused a change of mood. She was
feverish now, and impatience grew to resentment. The emotions which
were yesterday so dulled began to stir in her heart and brain. Walking
about the room, unable to occupy herself for a moment, she felt as
though fetters were upon her; this house had become a prison; her life
was that of a captive without hope of release.

There came in her a sudden outbreak of passionate indignation at the
unequal hardships of a woman's lot. Often as she had read and heard and
talked of this, she seemed to understand it for the first time; now
first was it real to her, in the sense of an ill that goads and
tortures. Not society alone was chargeable with the injustice; nature
herself had dealt cruelly with woman. Constituted as she is, limited as
she is by inexorable laws, by what refinement of malice is she endowed
with energies and desires like to those of men? She should have been
made a creature of sluggish brain, of torpid pulse; then she might have
discharged her natural duties without exposure to fever and pain and
remorse such as man never knows.

She asked no liberty to be vile, as her husband made himself; but that
she was denied an equal freedom to exercise all her powers, to enrich
her life with experiences of joy, this fired her to revolt. A woman who
belongs to the old education readily believes that it is not to
experiences of joy, but of sorrow, that she must look for her true
blessedness; her ideal is one of renunciation; religious motive is in
her enforced by what she deems the obligation of her sex