fastidious persons--but they were exclusively of her own sex--affirmed
that the bloody hand, as they chose to call it, quite destroyed the
effect of Georgiana's beauty and rendered her countenance even
hideous. But it would be as reasonable to say that one of those
small blue stains which sometimes occur in the purest statuary
marble would convert the Eve of Powers to a monster. Masculine
observers, if the birthmark did not heighten their admiration,
contented themselves with wishing it away, that the world might
possess one living specimen of ideal loveliness without the semblance
of a flaw. After his marriage--for he thought little or nothing
of the matter before--Aylmer discovered that this was the case
with himself.

Had she been less beautiful,--if Envy's self could have found aught
else to sneer at,--he might have felt his affection heightened
by the prettiness of this mimic hand, now vaguely portrayed, now
lost, now stealing forth again and glimmering to and fro with every
pulse of emotion that throbbed within her heart; but, seeing her
otherwise so perfect, he found this one defect grow more and more
intolerable with every moment of their united lives. It was the
fatal flaw of humanity which Nature, in one shape or another, stamps
ineffaceably on all her productions, either to imply that they are
temporary and finite, or that their perfection must be wrought by
toil and pain. The crimson hand expressed the ineludible gripe in
which mortality clutches the highest and purest of earthly mould,
degrading them into kindred with the lowest, and even with the
very brutes, like whom their visible frames return to dust. In
this manner, selecting it as the symbol of his wife's liability
to sin, sorrow, decay, and death, Aylmer's sombre imagination was
not long in rendering the birthmark a frightful object, causing
him more trouble and horror than ever Georgiana's beauty, whether
of soul or sense, had given him delight.

At all the seasons which should have been their happiest he invariably,
and without intending it, nay, in spite of a purpose to the contrary,
reverted to this one disastrous topic. Trifling as it at first
appeared, it so connected itself with innumerable trains of thought
and modes of feeling that it became the central point of all. With
the morning twilight Aylmer opened his eyes upon his wife's face and
recognized the symbol of imperfection; and when they sat together
at the evening hearth his eyes w