Book 6 - Chapter 13 - Page 2

Philip, suffer? _She_ had had to suffer through
many years of her life; and who had renounced anything for her? And
when something like that fulness of existence--love, wealth, ease,
refinement, all that her nature craved--was brought within her reach,
why was she to forego it, that another might have it,--another, who
perhaps needed it less? But amidst all this new passionate tumult
there were the old voices making themselves heard with rising power,
till, from time to time, the tumult seemed quelled. _Was_ that
existence which tempted her the full existence she dreamed? Where,
then, would be all the memories of early striving; all the deep pity
for another's pain, which had been nurtured in her through years of
affection and hardship; all the divine presentiment of something
higher than mere personal enjoyment, which had made the sacredness of
life? She might as well hope to enjoy walking by maiming her feet, as
hope to enjoy an existence in which she set out by maiming the faith
and sympathy that were the best organs of her soul. And then, if pain
were so hard to _her_, what was it to others? "Ah, God! preserve me
from inflicting--give me strength to bear it." How had she sunk into
this struggle with a temptation that she would once have thought
herself as secure from as from deliberate crime? When was that first
hateful moment in which she had been conscious of a feeling that
clashed with her truth, affection, and gratitude, and had not shaken
it from her with horror, as if it had been a loathsome thing? And yet,
since this strange, sweet, subduing influence did not, should not,
conquer her,--since it was to remain simply her own suffering,--her
mind was meeting Stephen's in that thought of his, that they might
still snatch moments of mute confession before the parting came. For
was not he suffering too? She saw it daily--saw it in the sickened
look of fatigue with which, as soon as he was not compelled to exert
himself, he relapsed into indifference toward everything but the
possibility of watching her. Could she refuse sometimes to answer that
beseeching look which she felt to be following her like a low murmur
of love and pain? She refused it less and less, till at last the
evening for them both was sometimes made of a moment's mutual gaze;
they thought of it till it came, and when it had come, they thought of
nothing else.

One other thing Stephen seemed now and then to care for, and that was
to sing; it was a way of speaking to Maggie. Perhaps he was not
distinctly conscious that he was impelled to it by a secret
longing--running counter to all his self-confessed resolves--to deepen
the hold he had on her. Watch your own speech, and notice how it is
guided by your less conscious purposes, and