 beings
closest to us, whether in love or hate, are often virtually our interpreters of
the world, and some feather-headed gentleman or lady whom in passing we regret
to take as legal tender for a human being may be acting as a melancholy theory
of life in the minds of those who live with them - like a piece of yellow and
wavy glass that distorts form and makes colour an affliction. Their trivial
sentences, their petty standards, their low suspicions, their loveless ennui,
may be making somebody else's life no better than a promenade through a pantheon
of ugly idols. Gwendolen had that kind of window before her, affecting the
distant equally with the near. Some unhappy wives are soothed by the possibility
that they may become mothers; but Gwendolen felt that to desire a child for
herself would have been a consenting to the completion of the injury she had
been guilty of. She was reduced to dread lest she should become a mother. It was
not the image of a new sweetly-budding life that came as a vision of deliverance
from the monotony of distaste: it was an image of another sort. In the
irritable, fluctuating stages of despair, gleams of hope came in the form of
some possible accident. To dwell on the benignity of accident was a refuge from
worse temptation.
    The embitterment of hatred is often as unaccountable to onlookers as the
growth of devoted love, and it not only seems but is really out of direct
relation with any outward causes to be alleged. Passion is of the nature of
seed, and finds nourishment within, tending to a predominance which determines
all currents towards itself, and makes the whole life its tributary. And the
intensest form of hatred is that rooted in fear, which compels to silence and
drives vehemence into a constructive vindictiveness, an imaginary annihilation
of the detested object, something like the hidden rites of vengeance with which
the persecuted have made a dark vent for their rage, and soothed their suffering
into dumbness. Such hidden rites went on in the secrecy of Gwendolen's mind, but
not with soothing effect - rather with the effect of a struggling terror. Side
by side with the dread of her husband had grown the self-dread which urged her
to flee from the pursuing images wrought by her pent-up impulse. The vision of
her past wrong-doing, and what it had brought on her, came with a pale ghastly
illumination over every imagined deed that was a rash effort at freedom, such as
she had made in her marriage. Moreover, she had learned to see all her acts
through the impression they would
