in the happiness of struggling and suffering together in accomplishment.
But she had only believed in that endeavor, that faith, while they were
gilded by the sun of love: and as the sun died down she saw them as
barren, gloomy mountains standing out against the empty sky: and her
strength failed her, so that she could go no farther on the road: what
was the good of reaching the summit? What was there on the other side?
It was a gigantic phantom and a snare!... Jacqueline could not
understand how Olivier could go on being taken in by such fantastic
notions which consumed life: and she began to tell herself that he was
not very clever, nor very much alive. She was stifling in his
atmosphere, in which she could not breathe, and the instinct of
self-preservation drove her on to the attack, in self-defense. She
strove to scatter and bring to dust the injurious beliefs of the man she
still loved: she used every weapon of irony and seductive pleasure in
her armory: she trammeled him with the tendrils of her desires and her
petty cares: she longed to make him a reflection of herself, ...
herself who knew neither what she wanted nor what she was! She was
humiliated by Olivier's want of success: and she did not care whether it
were just or unjust; for she had come to believe that the only thing
which saves a man of talent from failure is success. Olivier was
oppressed by his consciousness of her doubts, and his strength was
sapped by it. However, he struggled on as best he could, as so many men
have struggled, and will struggle, for the most part vainly, in the
unequal conflict in which the selfish instinct of the woman upholds
itself against the man's intellectual egoism by playing upon his
weakness, his dishonesty, and his common sense, which is the name with
which he disguises the wear and tear of life and his own cowardice.--At
least, Jacqueline and Olivier were better than the majority of such
combatants. For he would never have betrayed his ideal, as thousands of
men do who drift with the demands of their laziness, their vanity, and