Page 685 - the-portrait-of-a-lady

if she remembered rightly he had said he wished to take his
last look at her. Since then he had been the most discordant
survival of her earlier time-the only one in fact with which a
permanent pain was associated. He had left her that morn-
ing with a sense of the most superfluous of shocks: it was
like a collision between vessels in broad daylight. There had
been no mist, no hidden current to excuse it, and she her-
self had only wished to steer wide. He had bumped against
her prow, however, while her hand was on the tiller, and-to
complete the metaphor-had given the lighter vessel a strain
which still occasionally betrayed itself in a faint creaking.
It had been horrid to see him, because he represented the
only serious harm that (to her belief) she had ever done in
the world: he was the only person with an unsatisfied claim
on her. She had made him unhappy, she couldn’t help it; and
his unhappiness was a grim reality. She had cried with rage,
after he had left her, at-she hardly knew what: she tried to
think it had been at his want of consideration. He had come
to her with his unhappiness when her own bliss was so per-
fect; he had done his best to darken the brightness of those
pure rays. He had not been violent, and yet there had been a
violence in the impression. There had been a violence at any
rate in something somewhere; perhaps it was only in her
own fit of weeping and in that after-sense of the same which
had lasted three or four days.
The effect of his final appeal had in short faded away, and
all the first year of her marriage he had dropped out of her
books. He was a thankless subject of reference; it was dis-
agreeable to have to think of a person who was sore and

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