mind, but the ideal being unblemished carried all the force of reality in my inexperienced heart. Nor was I satisfied to have my husband's love for one life only, I must feel in my own consciousness that he had been mine in lives of the past and would be mine again in lives to come. That at any time his life should not have been entirely mine, that his affections should ever have belonged to another—I could not tolerate the idea. In this respect I expected of man what man expects of woman. As a man wants undivided devotion from the woman he marries, as she is not allowed ever to give a thought to any man but him, so did I want my husband's whole existence to be mine.
I do not know whether anyone sympathises with me, whether I can make anyone understand what I felt. I might pardon him, I might even marry him if need be, but he could never now reach up to my ideal. Time was when I thought he could be enshrined in my soul as all I had dreamed of in man, but I saw now that I had been mistaken. Now that the enchantment was over, he had become to me a mutilated idol, which could no longer
