ing his
impotence. When he learned, years before, from Mrs. Portico, what she
had done with her baby, of whose entrance into life she herself had
given him no intimation, he felt that he was face to face with a full
revelation of her nature. Before that it had puzzled him; it had amazed
him; his relations with her were bewildering, stupefying. But when,
after obtaining, with difficulty and delay, a leave of absence from
Government, and betaking himself to Italy to look for the child and
assume possession of it, he had encountered absolute failure and
defeat,--then the case presented itself to him more simply. He perceived
that he had mated himself with a creature who just happened to be
a monster, a human exception altogether. That was what he could n't
pardon--her conduct about the child; never, never, never! To him she
might have done what she chose,--dropped him, pushed him out into
eternal cold, with his hands fast tied,--and he would have accepted
it, excused her almost, admitted that it had been his business to mind
better what he was about. But she had tortured him through the poor
little irrecoverable son whom he had never seen, through the heart
and the vitals that she had not herself, and that he had to have, poor
wretch, for both of them!

All his efforts for years had been to forget these horrible months, and
he had cut himself off from them so that they seemed at times to belong
to the life of another person. But to-night he lived them over again;
he retraced the different gradations of darkness through which he had
passed, from the moment, so soon after his extraordinary marriage, when
it came over him that she already repented, and meant, if possible, to
elude all her obligations. This was the moment when he saw why she had
reserved herself--in the strange vow she extracted from him--an
open door for retreat; the moment, too, when her having had such an
inspiration (in the midst of her momentary good faith, if good faith it
had ever been) struck him as a proof of her essential depravity. What he
had tried to forget came back to him: the child that was not his child
produced for him when he fell upon that squalid nest of peasants in
the Genoese country; and then the confessions, retractations,
contradictions, lies, terrors, threats, and general bottomless, baffling
baseness of every one in the place. The child was gone; that had been
the only definite thing. The woman who had taken it to nurse had a
dozen