He didn't love her, he hated her, he only
wanted to smother her, to crush her, to kill her--as she would
infallibly see that he would if she listened to him. It was because he
knew that her voice had magic in it, and from the moment he caught its
first note he had determined to destroy it. It was not tenderness that
moved him--it was devilish malignity; tenderness would be incapable of
requiring the horrible sacrifice that he was not ashamed to ask, of
requiring her to commit perjury and blasphemy, to desert a work, an
interest, with which her very heart-strings were interlaced, to give the
lie to her whole young past, to her purest, holiest ambitions. Olive put
forward no claim of her own, breathed, at first, at least, not a word of
remonstrance in the name of her personal loss, of their blighted union;
she only dwelt upon the unspeakable tragedy of a defection from their
standard, of a failure on Verena's part to carry out what she had
undertaken, of the horror of seeing her bright career blotted out with
darkness and tears, of the joy and elation that would fill the breast of
all their adversaries at this illustrious, consummate proof of the
fickleness, the futility, the predestined servility, of women. A man had
only to whistle for her, and she who had pretended most was delighted to
come and kneel at his feet. Olive's most passionate protest was summed
up in her saying that if Verena were to forsake them it would put back
the emancipation of women a hundred years.
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