d
turns me sick with loathing,--made of me. Had that woman, silly, weak,
automatal as she is, really loved me; had she been sensible of the
unspeakable sacrifice I had made to her (Antony's was nothing to it,--he
lost a real world only; mine was the world of imagination); had she
but condescended to learn my nature, to subdue the woman's devil at
her own,--I could have lived on in this babbling hermitage forever,
and fancied myself happy and resigned,--I could have become a different
being. I fancy I could have become what your moralists (quacks!) call
'good.' But this fretting frivolity of heart, this lust of fool's
praise, this peevishness of temper, this sullenness in answer to the
moody thought, which in me she neither fathomed nor forgave, this
vulgar, daily, hourly pining at the paltry pinches of the body's
poverty, the domestic whine, the household complaint,--when I--I have
not a thought for such pitiful trials of affection; and all this while
my curses, my buried hope and disguised spirit and sunken name not
thought of; the magnitude of my surrender to her not even comprehended;
nay, her 'inconveniences'--a dim hearth, I suppose, or a daintiless
table--compared, ay, absolutely compared, with all which I abandoned for
her sake! As if it were not enough,--had I been a fool, an ambitionless,
soulless fool,-the mere thought that I had linked my name to that of a
tradesman,--I beg pardon, a retired tradesman!--as if that knowledge--a
knowledge I would strangle my whole race, every one who has ever met,
seen me, rather than they should penetrate--were not enough, when she
talks of 'comparing,' to make me gnaw the very flesh from my bones! No,
no, no! Never was there so bright a turn in my fate as when this titled
coxcomb, with his smooth voice and gaudy fripperies, came hither! I
will make her a tool to carve my escape from this cavern wherein she
has plunged me. I will foment 'my lord's' passion, till 'my lord' thinks
'the passion' (a butterfly's passion!) worth any price. I will then
make my own terms, bind 'my lord' to secrecy, and get rid of my wife,
my shame, and the obscurity of Mr. Welford forever. Bright, bright
prospects! let me shut my eyes to enjoy you! But softly! my noble friend
calls himself a man of the world, skilled in human nature, and a derider
of its prejudices; true enough, in his own little way--thanks not to
enlarged views, but a vicious experience--so he is! The book of the
world is a vast misc