"She believes it
is better to suffer than to be happy." He did not believe that; he would
settle this matter by his own light, and, by freeing her and saving her
faithful friends, be cut off from her for ever.
It would be an easy thing to do, to go up to the man and put a knife in
his heart, or shoot him like a dog!
His whole being revolted from the thought; when the deed came before his
eyes, it seemed to him that only in some dark feverish imagination could
he have dreamed of acting it out, that of course in plain common-sense,
that daylight of the mind, he could not will to do this.
Then he thought again of the misery of the suffering wife, and he
believed that, foreign as it was to his whole habit of life, he could do
this, even this, to save her.
Then again came over him the sickening dread that the old rules of right
and wrong that he had been taught were the right guides after all, and
that Josephine was right, and that he must submit.
The very thought of submission made his soul rise up in a mad tempest of
anger against such a moral law, against all who taught it, against the
God who was supposed to ordain it; and so strong was the tempest of this
wrath, and so weak was he, perplexed, wretched, that he would have been
glad even at the same moment to have appealed to the God of his fathers,
with whom he was quarrelling, for counsel and help.
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