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Hichens, Robert Smythe, 1864-1950

"A Spirit in Prison"


He stood there, facing the blackness and listening, while she seemed
to be telling him her woman's reasons for her present hatred of the
man who had been for so long a time her closest friend.
And these reasons were not only the reasons born of a day's events, of
the discovery of the lie on which her spirit had been resting. She did
not say--her heart did not say only: "I hate you because you let me
believe in that which never existed except in my imagination--my
husband's complete love of me, complete faithfulness to me. I hate you
because you enclosed me in the prison of a lie. I hate you because
during all these years you have been a witness of my devotion to an
idol, a graven image whose wooden grimace I mistook for the smile of
the god's happy messenger, because you have been a witness of my cult
for the memory of one who betrayed my trust in him, who thought
nothing of my gift to him, who put another in the sanctuary that
should have been sacred to me, and who has poisoned the sources of the
holy streams that flow into and feed the soul of a good woman.


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