For the first and only time, a
faint cry of conscious irritation escapes her, followed by an anguish of
repentance so deep, so meekly, humbly self-accusing, it reveals to us
more of her truest and innermost life than pages of elaborate description
could do. A single sentence descriptive of her mood even in that first
irritation brings before us her deepest soul, and the utter absence of
self isolation and self-insistence there:--"However just her indignation
might be, her ideal was not _to claim justice_, but _to give
tenderness_."
She meets Ladislaw; and he more than hints to her that the dim, vague
labours and accumulations of years which have constituted her husband's
nearest approach to life have been labour in vain; that the "great mind"
has been toiling, with feeble uncertain steps, in a path which has
already been trodden into firmness and completeness; toiling in wilful
and obdurate ignorance that other and abler natures have more than
anticipated all he has been painfully and abortively labouring to
accomplish. Again a cry bursts from the wounded heart, seemingly of
anger against her informant, really of anguish--anguish, not for her own
sinking hopes, but for the burden of disappointment and failure which she
instinctively perceives must, sooner or later, fall on the husband who is
thus throwing away life in vain.
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