20 CHARACTER OF THE MORE IMPASSIONED WOMAN. 



is weaker and is held in subjection. She loves too 

 much perhaps ; certainly hates too much ; and most 

 certainly reflects too little. Made to love, she loves 

 her husband ; but because she loves him, and because 

 there is constantly before her eyes the evidence of her 

 husband's love for another, she slowly or quickly 

 flings reason, and judgment, and duty, and compassion 

 to the winds. What matters it that the other mother 

 no longer lives ? She does not stop to think ; she 

 feels only, and she is lost. Jealously she broods and 

 ever broods until, step by step, the once open, affec- 

 tionate, warm, sympathetic woman becomes something 

 worse something much worse than a wild beast. 

 An innocent child, unwitting of offence, possibly not 

 very well behaved, possibly not very tractable (the 

 second wife's child would seem full of faults in the 

 eyes of a third if the second could but think of this), 

 a child made for caresses, is left naked and hungry, is 

 pinched and beaten, is burnt and scalded, is imprisoned 

 in dark closets or driven into the outer cold. Some- 

 times by a savage impulse it is suddenly slain. Some- 

 times with greater cruelty it is killed inch by inch. 

 It is the darkest hour of life to contemplate these 

 things. 



It is quite otherwise with the less impassioned step- 

 mother. Here, at any rate, the absence of deep 

 passion has immense compensation. Her more unbi- 

 assed feelings, and her habitual deference to respecta- 

 bility, stand her in good stead. She does her duty. 

 She treats her own child and her step-child alike. 

 She trains them with equal care ; dresses them with 

 equal propriety; greets and dismisses them with an 

 equal kiss. 



Happily in the great majority ...of impassioned women 



