There is no use trying to deceive myself--nor
you! I must have one human soul with whom I can talk about it as it
really is. I do not love him, I never did love him, I never shall
love him!
"Oh, how could they have all been so mistaken? Here is Aunt
Varina--one of those who helped to persuade me into this marriage.
She told me that love would come; it seemed to be her idea--my
mother had it too--that you had only to submit yourself to a man, to
follow and obey him, and love would take possession of your heart. I
tried credulously, and it did not happen as they promised. And now,
I am to bear him a child; and that will bind us together for ever!
"Oh, the despair of it--I do not love the father of my child! I say,
The child will be partly his, perhaps more his than mine. It will be
like him--it will have this quality and that, the very qualities,
perhaps, that are a source of distress to me in the father. So I
shall have these things before me day and night, all the rest of my
life; I shall have to see them growing and hardening; it will be a
perpetual crucifixion of my mother-love. I seek to comfort myself by
saying, The child can be trained differently, so that he will not
have these qualities.
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