Let it be; she could not
bear the struggle again.
She went on dressing herself in a dreary, mechanical way. Once,
a bitter laugh came on her face, as she looked into the glass,
and saw the dead, dull eyes, and the wrinkle on her forehead.
Was that the face to be crowned with delicate caresses and love?
She scorned herself for the moment, grew sick of herself, balked,
thwarted in her true life as she was. Other women whom God has
loved enough to probe to the depths of their nature have done the
same,--saw themselves as others saw them: their strength drying
up within them, jeered at, utterly alone. It is a trial we laugh
at. I think the quick fagots at the stake were fitter subjects
for laughter than the slow gnawing hunger in the heart of many a
slighted woman or a selfish man. They come out of the trial as
out of martyrdom, according to their faith: you see its marks
sometimes in a frivolous old age going down with tawdry hopes and
starved eyes to the grave; you see its victory in the freshest,
fullest lives in the earth. This woman had accepted her trial,
but she took it up as an inflexible fate which she did not
understand; it was new to her; its solitude, its hopeless thirst
were freshly bitter. She loathed herself as one whom God had
thought unworthy of every woman's right,--to love and be loved.
She went to the window, looking blankly out into the gray cold.
Any one with keen analytic eye, noting the thin muscles of this
woman, the protruding brain, the eyes deep, concealing, would
have foretold that she would conquer in the fight; force her soul
down,-- but that the forcing down would leave the weak, flaccid
body spent and dead.
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