The warm blood running fire through her now petulant veins taught her how mad was her former belief that she could meet the sacrifice her father proposed with resigned endurance. The revolt of her body was as fierce as that of her soul. Marriage was not like a commercial partnership in which each party lives on certain ground a life apart. It was the complete enslavement of an existence, the surrendering of private thought, of the sanctuaries of mind and person. No escape. Concealment would be subterfuge, the man’s dishonour the wife’s. Habit would be tyranny, the faintest demonstration of an unshared affection an oppression. She rose up at this thought with cheeks dyed scarlet, so acute was her apprehension of its meaning, and then dropped among her pillows, and hurried to hide from the shame of it under the protecting sheets.
No, she could not! Less cruel far was the old sacrifice at Aulis. Iphigenia might well bow to her father’s awful decision while her soul was unscourged by the scorpion whips of such degradation. The fire in her brain and the burn of hot dry eyelids kept her awake all night, pursued by terrible images of an unholy future, and her first thought, when the dawn touched light upon the window-panes, was to seek her father and intercept him before he left the Embassy. She knew he purposed going out early, intending to add to his notes at the University library, for the German meeting.
“Father,” she cried, in a voice of resolution he was quick to feel there was no shaking, “I must leave this house at once. You will go and make my excuses to the baron, while I will knock at the baroness’ door.”
“What has happened, child? You look disturbed and ill,” Selaka exclaimed, in wonderment.
“I will tell you when we are gone,” she said, growing whiter at the prospect of giving voice to the night’s sufferings. “Go now, dear father, and wait for me in the courtyard.”
“I did believe my daughter was not capricious.”
“Papa,” she pleaded, childishly, “love me a little, be kind to me. Do what I ask.”
Selaka mused half-angrily, as he went in search of the baron, so thoroughly mystified that he almost apprehended being unfitted for learned society that morning:
“Ah, why are these explosive engines, known as daughters, born to poor harassed man? We idly propagate them as candles to attract the moths around us; to dismay us with their flutter and impertinent importunities;--magnets to attract violent impulses, and run them cantering in rivalry.”