But when a woman, in her own nature
cold, takes delight in rousing passion, she will, selfishly
confident in her own safety, go to strange lengths in kindling and
fanning the flame which is the death of the other.
It is far from my intention to follow the disagreeable topic across
the pathless swamp through which an elaboration of its phases would
necessarily drag me. Of morbid anatomy, save for the setting forth
of cure, I am not fond, and here there is nothing to be said of
cure. What concerns me as a narrator is, that Emmeline consoled and
irritated and re-consoled Leopold, until she had him her very slave,
and the more her slave that by that time he knew something of her
character. The knowledge took from him what little repose she had
left him; he did no more good at school, and went to Cambridge with
the conviction that the woman to whom he had given his soul, would
be doing things in his absence the sight of which would drive him
mad. Yet somehow he continued to live, reassured now and then by the
loving letters she wrote to him, and relieving his own heart while
he fostered her falsehood by the passionate replies he made to them.
From a sad accident of his childhood, he had become acquainted with
something of the influences of a certain baneful drug, to the use of
which one of his attendants was addicted, and now at college, partly
from curiosity, partly from a desire to undergo its effects, but
chiefly in order to escape from ever-gnawing and passionate thought,
he began to make EXPERIMENTS in its use.
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