Oh George Eliot. Tell it like it is, sister
Through all these crowded excited months, Bertha’s inward self remained shrouded
from me, and I still read her thoughts only through the language of her lips and
demeanour: I had still the human interest of wondering whether what I did and said
pleased her, of longing to hear a word of affection, of giving a delicious exaggeration
of meaning to her smile. But I was conscious of a growing difference in her manner
towards me; sometimes strong enough to be called haughty coldness, cutting and
chilling me as the hail had done that came across the sunshine on our marriage
morning; sometimes only perceptible in the dexterous avoidance of a tête-à-tête walk
or dinner to which I had been looking forward. I had been deeply pained by
this—had even felt a sort of crushing of the heart, from the sense that my brief day of
happiness was near its setting; but still I remained dependent on Bertha, eager for the
last rays of a bliss that would soon be gone for ever, hoping and watching for some
after-glow more beautiful from the impending night.
For Bertha too, after her kind, felt the bitterness of disillusion. She had believed that
my wild poet’s passion for her would make me her slave; and that, being her slave, I
should execute her will in all things. With the essential shallowness of a negative,
unimaginative nature, she was unable to conceive the fact that sensibilities were
anything else than weaknesses. She had thought my weaknesses would put me in
her power, and she found them unmanageable forces. Our positions were reversed.
Before marriage she had completely mastered my imagination, for she was a secret to
me; and I created the unknown thought before which I trembled as if it were hers.
But now that her soul was laid open to me, now that I was compelled to share the
privacy of her motives, to follow all the petty devices that preceded her words and
acts, she found herself powerless with me, except to produce in me the chill shudder
of repulsion—powerless, because I could be acted on by no lever within her reach. I
was dead to worldly ambitions, to social vanities, to all the incentives within the
compass of her narrow imagination, and I lived under influences utterly invisible to
her.
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