I remember, during a walking tour one year, coming across a
lovely little cottage. It was the sweetest place imaginable. I need not
describe it. It was the cottage one sees in pictures, and reads of in
sentimental poetry. I was leaning over the neatly-cropped hedge,
drinking in its beauty, when at one of the tiny casements I saw, looking
out at me, a face. It stayed there only a moment, but in that moment the
cottage had become ugly, and I hurried away with a shudder.
"That woman's face reminded me of the incident. It was an angel's face,
until the woman herself looked out of it: then you were struck by the
strange incongruity between tenement and tenant.
"That at one time she had loved her husband, I have little doubt. Vicious
women have few vices, and sordidness is not usually one of them. She had
probably married him, borne towards him by one of those waves of passion
upon which the souls of animal natures are continually rising and
falling. On possession, however, had quickly followed satiety, and from
satiety had grown the desire for a new sensation.
"They were living at Cairo at the period; her husband held an important
official position there, and by virtue of this, and of her own beauty and
tact, her house soon became the centre of the Anglo-Saxon society ever
drifting in and out of the city.
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