surrounded by phantoms in the noonday, trembling under a breeze when the
leaves were still, without appetite for the common objects of human
desires, but pining after the moon-beams. We were front to front with
each other, and judged each other. The terrible moment of complete
illumination had come to me, and I saw that the darkness had hidden no
landscape from me, but only a blank prosaic wall: from that evening
forth, through the sickening years which followed, I saw all round the
narrow room of this woman's soul--saw petty artifice and mere negation
where I had delighted to believe in coy sensibilities and in wit at war
with latent feeling--saw the light floating vanities of the girl defining
themselves into the systematic coquetry, the scheming selfishness, of the
woman--saw repulsion and antipathy harden into cruel hatred, giving pain
only for the sake of wreaking itself.

For Bertha too, after her kind, felt the bitterness of disillusion. She
had believed that my wild poet's passion for her would make me her slave;
and that, being her slave, I should execute her will in all things. With
the essential shallowness of a negative, unimaginative nature, she was
unable to conceive the fact that sensibilities were anything else than
weaknesses. She had thought my weaknesses would put me in her power, and
she found them unmanageable forces. Our positions were reversed. Before
marriage she had completely mastered my imagination, for she was a secret
to me; and I created the unknown thought before which I trembled as if it
were hers. But now that her soul was laid open to me, now that I was
compelled to share the privacy of her motives, to follow all the petty
devices that preceded her words and acts, she found herself powerless
with me, except to produce in me the chill shudder of repulsion--
powerless, because I could be acted on by no lever within her
reach. I was dead to worldly ambitions, to social vanities, to all the
incentives within the compass of her narrow imagination, and I lived