Their odious partner
had trampled upon them from the beginning of time, and their tenderness,
their abnegation, had been his opportunity. All the bullied wives, the
stricken mothers, the dishonoured, deserted maidens who have lived on
the earth and longed to leave it, passed and repassed before her eyes,
and the interminable dim procession seemed to stretch out a myriad hands
to her. She sat with them at their trembling vigils, listened for the
tread, the voice, at which they grew pale and sick, walked with them by
the dark waters that offered to wash away misery and shame, took with
them, even, when the vision grew intense, the last shuddering leap. She
had analysed to an extraordinary fineness their susceptibility, their
softness; she knew (or she thought she knew) all the possible tortures
of anxiety, of suspense and dread; and she had made up her mind that it
was women, in the end, who had paid for everything. In the last resort
the whole burden of the human lot came upon them; it pressed upon them
far more than on the others, the intolerable load of fate. It was they
who sat cramped and chained to receive it; it was they who had done all
the waiting and taken all the wounds.
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