ter their most tremendous, and, it seemed to
her, heaven-rending passion--yea, when for her every veil seemed
rent and a terrible and sacred creative darkness covered the
earth--then--after all this wonder and miracle--in crept a poisonous
grey snake of disillusionment, a poisonous grey snake of disillusion
that bit her to madness, so that she really was a mad woman, demented.

Why? Why? He never gave himself. He never came to her, _really_. He
withheld himself. Yes, in those supreme and sacred times which for her
were the whole culmination of life and being, the ecstasy of unspeakable
passional conjunction, he was not really hers. He was withheld. He
withheld the central core of himself, like the devil and hell-fiend he
was. He cheated and made play with her tremendous passional soul, her
sacred sex passion, most sacred of all things for a woman. All the time,
some central part of him stood apart from her, aside, looking on.

Oh, agony and horror for a passionate, fierce-hearted woman! She who
loved him. She who loved him to madness. She who would have died for
him. She who did die with him, many terrible and magnificent connubial
deaths, in his arms, her husband.

Her husband! How bitter the word grew to her! Her husband! and him never
once given, given wholly to her! Her husband--and in all the frenzied
finality of desire, she never _fully_ possessed him, not once. No, not
once. As time went on, she learned it for inevitable. Not once!

And then, how she hated him! Cheated, foiled, betrayed, forced to love
him or to hate him: never able to be at peace near him nor away from
him: poor Lottie, no wonder she was as a mad woman. She was strictly
as a woman demented, after the birth of her second child. For all
her instinct, all her impulse, all her desire, and above all, all her
_will_, was to possess her man in very fulness once: just once: and once
and for all. Once, just once: and it would be once and for all.

But never! Never! Not once! Never! Not for one single solitary second!
Was it not enough to send a woman mad! Was it not enough to make her
demented! Yes, and mad she was. She made his life a hell for him. She
bit him to the bone with her frenzy of rage, chagrin, and agony. She
drove him mad, too: mad, so that he beat her: mad so that he longed
to kill her. But even in his greatest rages it was the same: he
never finally lost himself: he remained, somewhere in the centre, in
possession of himself. She somet