s left for her but that. She felt that it was an
impossibility to draw back from her present position. She did not even
entertain the idea of an attempt to escape from it, it seemed such a
hopeless task, she was so cowardly, so crushed and degraded, and she
felt that she was still so firmly bound to that man by all sorts of
vile, degrading chains, even by the contempt that he no longer tried to
conceal from her!

Sometimes, as she reflected upon her plight, she was dismayed. The
simple ideas and terrors of the peasantry recurred to her mind. And the
superstitions of her youth whispered to her that the man had cast a
spell upon her, that he had perhaps given her enchanted bread to eat.
Otherwise would she have been what she was? Would she have felt, at the
mere sight of him, that thrill of emotion through her whole frame, that
almost brute-like sensation of the approach of a master? Would she have
felt her whole body, her mouth, her arms, her loving and caressing
gestures involuntarily go out to him? Would she have belonged to him so
absolutely? Long and bitterly she dwelt upon all that should have cured
her, rescued her: the man's disdain, his insults, the degrading
concessions he had forced from her; and she was compelled to admit that
there had been nothing too precious for her to sacrifice to him, and
that for him she had swallowed the things she loathed most bitterly. She
tried to imagine the degree of degradation to which her love would
refuse to descend, and she could conceive of none. He could do what he
chose with her, insult her, beat her, and she would remain under his
heel! She could not think of herself as not belonging to him. She could
not think of herself without him. To have that man to love was necessary
to her existence; she derived warmth from him, she lived by him, she
breathed him. There seemed to be no parallel case to hers among the
women of her condition whom she knew. No one of her comrades carried
into a _liaison_ the intensity, the bitterness, the torture, the
enjoyment of suffering that she found in hers. No one of them carried
into it that which was killing her and which she could not dispense
with.

To herself she appeared an extraordinary creature, of an exceptional
nature, with the temperament of animals whom ill-treatment binds the
closer to their masters. There were days when she did not know herself,
and when she wondered if she were still the same woman. As she went over
in her mind