u will have to remember
she seriously believed that children who might be born to her went in
danger, if not absolutely of damnation, at any rate of receiving false
doctrine. It was an agony more terrible than she could describe. She
didn't indeed attempt to describe it, but I could tell from her voice
when she said, almost negligently, "I used to lie awake whole nights. It
was no good my spiritual advisers trying to console me." I knew from her
voice how terrible and how long those nights must have seemed and of
how little avail were the consolations of her spiritual advisers. Her
spiritual advisers seemed to have taken the matter a little more calmly.
They certainly told her that she must not consider herself in any way
to have sinned. Nay, they seem even to have extorted, to have threatened
her, with a view to getting her out of what they considered to be a
morbid frame of mind. She would just have to make the best of things,
to influence the children when they came, not by propaganda, but by
personality. And they warned her that she would be committing a sin if
she continued to think that she had sinned. Nevertheless, she continued
to think that she had sinned.

Leonora could not be aware that the man whom she loved passionately
and whom, nevertheless, she was beginning to try to rule with a rod of
iron--that this man was becoming more and more estranged from her. He
seemed to regard her as being not only physically and mentally cold, but
even as being actually wicked and mean. There were times when he would
almost shudder if she spoke to him. And she could not understand how
he could consider her wicked or mean. It only seemed to her a sort of
madness in him that he should try to take upon his own shoulders the
burden of his troop, of his regiment, of his estate and of half of his
country. She could not see that in trying to curb what she regarded as
megalomania she was doing anything wicked. She was just trying to keep
things together for the sake of the children who did not come. And,
little by little, the whole of their intercourse became simply one of
agonized discussion as to whether Edward should subscribe to this or
that institution or should try to reclaim this or that drunkard. She
simply could not see it.

Into this really terrible position of strain, from which there appeared
to be no issue, the Kilsyte case came almost as a relief. It is part
of the peculiar irony of things that Edward would certainly