present, as
well as push the fortunes of the bridegroom. "Besides," said Aunt
Petherick, "a nice hash you'll make of it if you go and label yourself
damaged goods before you're fairly started. Why, it would be just
giving Dale the whip-hand over you for the rest of your days." Looking
back at it all, Mavis felt that this argument was irrefutable.

After marriage she began to love Will most truly and devotedly--but
not for his embraces, which did not even stir her pulses, which only
made her tenderly happy that she could make him happy. Now after
eleven years her feeling toward him was all unselfish and beautiful, a
gentle and deep affection, without a taint of anything that one would
not call really _lady-like_. The passion and boisterousness were all
on his side.

And thinking of things that she had never told Will, she wondered if
this calmness of temperament, or perhaps unusual failure in response,
was but another fatal consequence of the Barradine slavery. If so,
what cause she had to hate and curse him! The episode with him was
simply an irksomeness: it had frozen her instead of warming her,
checked her expansion, and perhaps, breaking the cycle of normal
development, made her imperfect as a woman.

Perhaps this was the real reason why she had remained childless. She
represented completed womanhood in this respect at least, that she
desired to be a mother. The possession of children was the one thing
that made her envious of other women. The idea of having a child of
her own made her almost faint with longing--a baby to nurse, a little
burden to wheel about in a perambulator, a companion to prattle to her
all day while Will was busy down-stairs. If the hope of such joy had
been taken from her by Mr. Barradine, oh, how immeasureably great was
her cause for hatred!

She sat staring at the distant point where he and his horse had just
now vanished, and for a little while her thoughts were like curses.
Any attributes of grandeur were transitory illusions; he was wholly
mean and base: he was the embodied principle of evil that had spoiled
the past and that still threatened the future. She wished that he
might eventually suffer as much as he had made her suffer. She wished
that he might be racked with rheumatism, burned up with gout, tortured
with every conceivable painful disease. She wished him dead and
crumbling to dust in his coffin.

After tea she came back to the window and stayed there till nightfall.

Lit