under influences utterly invisible to her.

She was really pitiable to have such a husband, and so all the world
thought. A graceful, brilliant woman, like Bertha, who smiled on morning
callers, made a figure in ball-rooms, and was capable of that light
repartee which, from such a woman, is accepted as wit, was secure of
carrying off all sympathy from a husband who was sickly, abstracted, and,
as some suspected, crack-brained. Even the servants in our house gave
her the balance of their regard and pity. For there were no audible
quarrels between us; our alienation, our repulsion from each other, lay
within the silence of our own hearts; and if the mistress went out a
great deal, and seemed to dislike the master's society, was it not
natural, poor thing? The master was odd. I was kind and just to my
dependants, but I excited in them a shrinking, half-contemptuous pity;
for this class of men and women are but slightly determined in their
estimate of others by general considerations, or even experience, of
character. They judge of persons as they judge of coins, and value those
who pass current at a high rate.

After a time I interfered so little with Bertha's habits that it might
seem wonderful how her hatred towards me could grow so intense and active
as it did. But she had begun to suspect, by some involuntary betrayal of
mine, that there was an abnormal power of penetration in me--that
fitfully, at least, I was strangely cognizant of her thoughts and
intentions, and she began to be haunted by a terror of me, which
alternated every now and then with defiance. She meditated continually
how the incubus could be shaken off her life--how she could be freed from
this hateful bond to a being whom she at once despised as an imbecile,
and dreaded as an inquisitor. For a long while she lived in the hope
that my evident wretchedness would drive me to the commission of suicide;