 his side of the contract.
    And Gwendolen, we know, was thoroughly aware of the situation. She could not
excuse herself by saying that there had been a tacit part of the contract on her
side - namely, that she meant to rule and have her own way. With all her early
indulgence in the disposition to dominate, she was not one of the narrow-brained
women who through life regard all their own selfish demands as rights, and every
claim upon themselves as an injury. She had a root of conscience in her, and the
process of purgatory had begun for her on the green earth: she knew that she had
been wrong.
    But now enter into the soul of this young creature as she found herself,
with the blue Mediterranean dividing her from the world, on the tiny
plank-island of a yacht, the domain of the husband to whom she felt that she had
sold herself, and had been paid the strict price - nay, paid more than she had
dared to ask in the handsome maintenance of her mother: - the husband to whom
she had sold her truthfulness and sense of justice, so that he held them
throttled into silence, collared and dragged behind him to witness what he
would, without remonstrance.
    What had she to complain of? The yacht was of the prettiest; the cabin
fitted up to perfection, smelling of cedar, soft-cushioned, hung with silk,
expanded with mirrors; the crew such as suited an elegant toy, one of them
having even ringlets, as well as a bronze complexion and fine teeth; and Mr.
Lush was not there, for he had taken his way back to England as soon as he had
seen all and everything on board. Moreover, Gwendolen herself liked the sea: it
did not make her ill; and to observe the rigging of the vessel and forecast the
necessary adjustments was a sort of amusement that might have gratified her
activity and enjoyment of imaginary rule; the weather was fine, and they were
coasting southward, where even the rain-furrowed, heat-cracked clay becomes
gem-like with purple shadows, and where one may float between blue and blue in
an open-eyed dream that the world has done with sorrow.
    But what can still that hunger of the heart which sickens the eye for
beauty, and makes sweet-scented ease an oppression? What sort of Moslem paradise
would quiet the terrible fury of moral repulsion and cowed resistance which,
like an eating pain intensifying into torture, concentrates the mind in that
poisonous misery? While Gwendolen, throned on her cushions at evening, and
