"
With a glare of pain and scorn she walked away from him in silence.
It is shocking indeed to be fastened speechless upon a rack, and to be
charged by uncomprehending souls with counterfeiting emotion. She was so
constituted that she could not help laying up this speech of her husband's
against him as one of many stolid misdoings which justified both contempt
and aversion. In fact, his inability or unwillingness to comprehend her
had always been, in her searching and sensitive eyes, his chief crime. To
be understood, to be accepted at her full worth, was one of the most
urgent demands of her nature.
The life of this young woman, not only within but without, was strange
indeed. She fulfilled that problem of Hawthorne's--an individual bearing
one character, living one life in one place, and a totally different one
in another place--upon one spot of earth angelic, and upon another vile.
Stranger still, her harsher qualities appeared where her manner of life
was lawful, and her finer ones where it was condemnable. At Northport she
had been like sunlight to her intimates and like a ministering seraph to
the poor. In New York she avoided society: she had no tenderness for
misery.
The explanation seems to be that love was her only motive of feeling and
action.
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