Page 613 - for-the-term-of-his-natural-life

The young, impulsive, delicate girl, who had given herself
to him seven years before, had been changed into a weary,
suffering woman. The wife is what her husband makes her,
and his rude animalism had made her the nervous invalid
she was. Instead of love, he had awakened in her a distaste
which at times amounted to disgust. We have neither the
skill nor the boldness of that profound philosopher whose
autopsy of the human heart awoke North’s contemplation,
and we will not presume to set forth in bare English the
story of this marriage of the Minotaur. Let it suffice to say
that Sylvia liked her husband least when he loved her most.
In this repulsion lay her power over him. When the animal
and spiritual natures cross each other, the nobler triumphs
in fact if not in appearance. Maurice Frere, though his wife
obeyed him, knew that he was inferior to her, and was afraid
of the statue he had created. She was ice, but it was the arti-
ficial ice that chemists make in the midst of a furnace. Her
coldness was at once her strength and her weakness. When
she chilled him, she commanded him.
Unwitting of the thoughts that possessed his guest, Frere
chatted amicably. North said little, but drank a good deal.
The wine, however, rendered him silent, instead of talkative.
He drank that he might forget unpleasant memories, and
drank without accomplishing his object. When the pair
proceeded to the room where Mrs. Frere awaited them,
Frere was boisterously good-humoured, North silently mis-
anthropic.
‘Sing something, Sylvia!’ said Frere, with the ease of pos-
session, as one who should say to a living musical-box, ‘Play

1 For the Term of His Natural Life