Chapter 5 - Page 2

sun of my senses," he said, embracing her. "I
feel my heart and brain wither in your smile, and I fling them to
you for your prey with exultation. How happy I am to have a wife
who does not despise me for doing so--who rather loves me the
more!"

"Don't be silly," said Henrietta, smiling vacantly. Then, stung
by a half intuition of his meaning, she repulsed him and said
angrily, "YOU despise ME."

"Not more than I despise myself. Indeed, not so much; for many
emotions that seem base from within seem lovable from without."

"You intend to leave me again. I feel it. I know it."

"You think you know it because you feel it. Not a bad reason,
either."

"Then you ARE going to leave me?"

"Do you not feel it and know it? Yes, my cherished Hetty, I
assuredly am."

She broke into wild exclamations of grief, and he drew her head
down and kissed her with a tender action which she could not
resist, and a wry face which she did not see.

"My poor Hetty, you don't understand me."

"I only understand that you hate me, and want to go away from
me."

"That would be easy to understand. But the strangeness is that I
LOVE you and want to go away from you. Not for ever. Only for a
time."

"But I don't want you to go away. I won't let you go away," she
said, a trace of fierceness mingling with her entreaty. "Why do
you want to leave me if you love me?"

"How do I know? I can no more tell you the whys and wherefores of
myself than I can lift myself up by the waistband and carry
myself into the next county, as some one challenged a speculator
in perpetual motion to do. I am too much a pessimist to respect
my own affections. Do you know what a pessimist is?"

"A man who thinks everybody as nasty as himself, and hates them
for it."

"So, or thereabout. Modern English polite society, my native
sphere, seems to me as corrupt as consciousness of culture and
absence of honesty can make it. A canting, lie-loving,
fact-hating, scribbling, chattering, wealth-hunting,
pleasure-hunting, celebrity-hunting mob, that, having lost the
fear of hell, and not replaced it by the love of justice, cares
for nothing but the lion's share of the wealth wrung by threat of
starvation from the hands of the classes that create it. If you
interrupt me with a silly speech, Hetty, I will pitch you into
the canal, and die of sorrow for my lost love afterwards. You
know what I am, according to the conventional description: a
gentleman with lots of money. Do you know the wicked origin of
that money and gentility?"

"Oh, Sidney; have you been doing anything?"

"No, my best beloved; I am a gentleman, and have been doing
nothing. That a man can do