'
The strange thing now was that this fictitious love wrung from her
by terror took on, through mere habit of enactment, a certain
quality of reality. A servile mood of attachment to the Earl became
distinctly visible in her contemporaneously with an actual dislike
for her late husband's memory. The mood of attachment grew and
continued when the statue was removed. A permanent revulsion was
operant in her, which intensified as time wore on. How fright could
have effected such a change of idiosyncrasy learned physicians alone
can say; but I believe such cases of reactionary instinct are not
unknown.
The upshot was that the cure became so permanent as to be itself a
new disease. She clung to him so tightly, that she would not
willingly be out of his sight for a moment. She would have no
sitting-room apart from his, though she could not help starting when
he entered suddenly to her. Her eyes were well-nigh always fixed
upon him. If he drove out, she wished to go with him; his slightest
civilities to other women made her frantically jealous; till at
length her very fidelity became a burden to him, absorbing his time,
and curtailing his liberty, and causing him to curse and swear. If
he ever spoke sharply to her now, she did not revenge herself by
flying off to a mental world of her own; all that affection for
another, which had provided her with a resource, was now a cold
black cinder.
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