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Page 58
But it was not easy to give Bennett up, to let him pass out of her life.
She wanted to love him yet. With all her heart and strength, in spite of
everything--woman that she was, she had come to that--in spite of
everything she wanted to love him. Though he had broken her will,
thwarted her ambitions, ignored her cherished hopes, misunderstood and
mistaken her, yet, if she could, Lloyd would yet have loved him, loved
him even for the very fact that he had been stronger than she.
Again and again she tried to awaken this dead affection, to call back
this vanished love. She tried to remember the Bennett she had known; she
told herself that he loved her; that he had said that the great things
he had done had been done only with an eye to her approval; that she had
been his inspiration no less than he had been hers; that he had fought
his way back, not only to life, but to her. She thought of all he had
suffered, of the hardships and privations beyond her imagination to
conceive, that he had undergone. She tried to recall the infinite joy of
that night when the news of his safe return had come to her; she thought
of him at his very best--how he had always seemed to her the type of the
perfect man, masterful, aggressive, accomplishing great projects with an
energy and determination almost superhuman, one of the world's great
men, whose name the world still shouted. She called to mind how the very
ruggedness of his face; with its massive lines and harsh angles, had
attracted her; how she had been proud of his giant's strength, the vast
span of his shoulders, the bull-like depth of his chest, the sense of
enormous physical power suggested by his every movement.
But it was all of no effect. That Bennett was worse than dead to her.
The Bennett that now came to her mind and imagination was the brutal,
perverse man of the breakfast-room at Medford, coarse, insolent,
intractable, stamping out all that was finest in her, breaking and
flinging away the very gifts he had inspired her to offer him. It was
nothing to him that she should stand degraded in the eyes of the world.
He did not want her to be brave and strong. She had been wrong; it was
not that kind of woman he desired. He had not acknowledged that she,
too, as well as he--a woman as well as a man might have her principles,
her standards of honour, her ideas of duty. It was not her character,
then, that he prized; the nobility of her nature was nothing to him; he
took no thought of the fine-wrought texture of her mind. How, then, did
she appeal to him? It was not her mind; it was not her soul. What, then,
was left? Nothing but the physical. The shame of it; the degradation of
it! To be so cruelly mistaken in the man she loved, to be able to appeal
to him only on his lower side! Lloyd clasped her hands over her eyes,
shutting her teeth hard against a cry of grief and pain and impotent
anger. No, no, now it was irrevocable; now her eyes were opened. The
Bennett she had known and loved had been merely a creature of her own
imagining; the real man had suddenly discovered himself; and this man,
in spite of herself, she hated as a victim hates its tyrant.
But her grief for her vanished happiness--the happiness that this love,
however mistaken, had brought into her life--was pitiful. Lloyd could
not think of it without the choke coming to her throat and the tears
brimming her dull-blue eyes, while at times a veritable paroxysm of
sorrow seized upon her and flung her at full length upon her couch, her
face buried and her whole body shaken with stifled sobs. It was gone, it
was gone, and could never be called back. What was there now left to her
to live for? Why continue her profession? Why go on with the work? What
pleasure now in striving and overcoming? Where now was the exhilaration
of battle with the Enemy, even supposing she yet had the strength to
continue the fight? Who was there now to please, to approve, to
encourage? To what end the days of grave responsibilities, the long,
still nights of vigil?
She began to doubt herself. Bennett, the man, had loved his work for its
own sake. But how about herself, the woman? In what spirit had she gone
about her work? Had she been genuine, after all? Had she not undertaken
it rather as a means than as an end--not because she cared for it, but
because she thought he would approve, because she had hoped by means of
the work she would come into closer companionship with him? She wondered
if this must always be so--the man loving the work for the work's sake;
the woman, more complex, weaker, and more dependent, doing the work only
in reference to the man.
But often she distrusted her own conclusions, and, no doubt, rightly so.
Her mind was yet too confused to reason calmly, soberly, and accurately.
Her distress was yet too keen, too poignant to permit her to be logical.
At one time she was almost ready to admit that she had misjudged
Bennett; that, though he had acted cruelly and unjustly, he had done
what he thought was best. His sacrifice of Ferriss was sufficient
guarantee of his sincerity. But this mistrust of herself did not affect
her feeling toward him. There were moments when she condoned his
offence; there was never an instant she did not hate him.
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