elf and be a loyal and happy wife to this
clutching, hard-breathing little man who had got her, and it was the
insatiable excesses of his demands quite as much as any outer influence
that made her realize the impossibility of such a concentration.

His was a supremely acquisitive and possessive character, so that he
insulted her utmost subjugations by an obtrusive suspicion and jealousy,
he was jealous of her childish worship of her dead father, jealous of
her disposition to go to church, jealous of the poet Wordsworth because
she liked to read his sonnets, jealous because she loved great music,
jealous when she wanted to go out; if she seemed passionless and she
seemed more and more passionless he was jealous, and the slightest gleam
of any warmth of temperament filled him with a vile and furious dread of
dishonouring possibilities. And the utmost resolution to believe in him
could not hide from her for ever the fact that his love manifested
itself almost wholly as a parade of ownership and a desire, without
kindliness, without any self-forgetfulness. All his devotion, his
self-abjection, had been the mere qualms of a craving, the flush of
eager courtship. Do as she would to overcome these realizations, forces
within her stronger than herself, primordial forces with the welfare of
all life in their keeping, cried out upon the meanness of his face, the
ugly pointed nose and the thin compressed lips, the weak neck, the
clammy hands, the ungainly nervous gestures, the tuneless whistling
between the clenched teeth. He would not let her forget a single detail.
Whenever she tried to look at any created thing, he thrust himself, like
one of his own open-air advertisements, athwart the attraction.

As she grew up to an achieved womanhood--and it was even a physical
growing-up, for she added more than an inch of stature after her
marriage--her life became more and more consciously like a fencing match
in which her vision flashed over his head and under his arms and this
side of him and that, while with a toiling industry he fought to
intercept it. And from the complete acceptance of her matrimonial
submission, she passed on by almost insensible degrees towards a
conception of her life as a struggle, that seemed at first entirely
lonely and unsupported, to exist--_against_ him.

In every novel as in every picture there must be an immense
simplification, and so I tell the story of Lady Harman's changing
attitude without any of