mona lisa painting

All this was torture to me- refined, lingering torture. It kept
up a slow fire of indignation and a trembling trouble of grief,
which harassed and crushed me altogether. I felt how- if I were his
wife, this good man, pure as the deep sunless source, could soon
kill me, without drawing from my veins a single drop of blood, or
receiving on his own crystal conscience the faintest stain of crime.
Especially I felt this when I made any attempt to propitiate him. No
ruth met my ruth. He experienced no suffering from estrangement- no
yearning after reconciliation; and though, more than once, my fast
falling tears blistered the page over which we both bent, they
produced no more effect on him than if his heart had been really a
matter of stone or metal. To his sisters, meantime, he was somewhat
kinder than usual: as if afraid that mere coldness would not
sufficiently convince me how completely I was banished and banned,
he added the force of contrast; and this I am sure he did not by
malice, but on principle.
The night before he left home, happening to see him walking in
the garden about sunset, and remembering, as I looked at him, that
this man, alienated as he now was, had once saved my life, and that we