Geoffrey Ludlow covered his face with his hands, and groaned. Once again she looked at him--this time as if she saw him--and went on:
"Let me speak to you, while I can, of yourself--while I can, I say, for his face is rising between me and all the world beside, and I can hardly force myself to remember any thing, to calculate any thing, to realise any thing which is not him. You ask me not to leave you; you would have me stay! Are you mad, Geoffrey Ludlow? Have you lived among your canvases and your colours until you have ceased to understand what men and women are, and to see facts? Do you know that I love him, though he left me to what you saved me from, so that all that you have done for me and given me has been burdensome and hateful to me, because these things had no connection with him, but marked the interval in which he was lost to me? Do you know that I love him so, that I have sickened and pined in this house, even as I sickened and pined for hunger in the streets you took me from, for the most careless word he ever spoke and the coldest look he ever gave me? Do you know the agonised longing which has been mine, the frantic weariness, the unspeakable loathing of every thing that set my life apart from the time when my life was his? No, you don't know these things! Again I say, how should you? Well, I tell them to you now, and I ask you, are you mad that you say, 'Don't leave me'? Would you have me stay with _you_ to think of _him_ all the weary hours of the day, all the wakeful hours of the night? Would you have me stay with you to feel, and make you know that I feel, the tie between us an intolerable and hideous bondage, and that with every pang of love for him came a throb of loathing for you? No, no! you are nothing to me now,--nothing, nothing! My thoughts hurry away from you while I speak; but if any thing so preposterous as my staying with you could be possible, you would be the most hateful object on this earth to me."
"My God!" gasped Geoffrey. That was all The utter, unspeakable horror with which her words, poured out in a hard ringing voice, which never faltered, filled him overpowered all remonstrance. A strange feeling, which was akin to fear of this beautiful unmasked demon, came over him. It was Margaret, his wife, who spoke thus! The knowledge and its fullest agony were in his heart; and yet a sense of utter strangeness and impossibility were there too. The whirl within him was not to be correctly termed thought; but there was in it something of the past, a puzzled remembrance of her strange quietude, her listlessness, her acquiescent, graceful, wearied, compliant ways; and this was she,--this woman whose eyes burned with flames of passion and desperate purpose--on those ordinarily pale cheeks two spots of crimson glowed,--whose lithe frame trembled with the intense fervour of the love which she was declaring for another man! Yes, this was she! It seemed impossible; but it was true.