Such an awful look of terror haunted her eyes, that at her gaze
a cold shiver, born of one's own fears and forebodings, ran through one.
She compelled us to realise the things we scarcely dare foresee....
I shall never forget a letter in which she wrote these words in a queer,
faltering handwriting:
"If men suspected what took place in a woman's inner life after forty,
they would avoid us like the plague, or knock us on the head like mad
dogs."
Such a philosophy of life ended in the poor woman being shut up in a
madhouse. She ought to have kept it to herself instead of posting it up
on the walls of her house. It was quite sufficient as a proof of her
insanity.
I cannot think what induced me to visit her in the asylum. Not pure
pity. I was prompted rather by that kind of painful curiosity which
makes a patient ask to see a limb which has just been amputated. I
wanted to look with my own eyes into that shadowy future which Agatha
had reached before me.
What did I discover? She had never cared for her husband; on the
contrary she had betrayed him with an effrontery that would hardly have
been tolerated outside the smart world; yet now she suffered the
torments of hell from jealousy of her husband.
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