Year: 1876

Why the sky was so blue,


Yet he told me quite true


Knowing birdie!


GrandcOurt and Gwend0len.


Madonna Pia, whose husband, feeling
himself injured by her, took her to
his castle among the swampy flats of
the Maremma and got rid Of her there,
makes a pathetic figure in Dante Pur-
gatory, among the sinners who repent
ed at the last and desire to be remem-
bered compassionately by their fel.
low-countrymen.


Weknow but little about the grounds
of mutual discomfort between the Sien.
nese couple. but we may infer with
some confidence that the husband
never had been very delightful COM
panion, and that on the flats of the
Maremma, his disagreeable manners
had background which threw them
out remarkably; whence, in his de-
sire to punish his wife to the utter
most, the nature of things was so far
against him that in relieving himself
of her he could not avoid making the
relief mutual. And thus, without any
hardness to the poor Tuscan lady who
had her deliverance long ago, one may
feel warranted in thinking of her with
a less sympathetic interest than of the
better known Gwendolen, who, instead
of being delivered from her errors on
earth and cleansed from their effect in
purgatory. is at the very height of her
ENHANCEMENT in those fatal meshes
which are woven within more closely
than without, and often make the in
ward torture disproportionate to what
is discernable as outward cause.


In taking his wife with him on a
yachting expedition, Grandcourt had
no intention to get rid of her on the
contrary, he wanted to feel more Sc
curely that she was his to do as he
liked with, and to make her feel it al
so. Moreover, he was himself very
fond of yachting it's dreamy dO.noth.
ing absolutism, unmolested by social
demands, suited his disposition, and
he did not in the least regard it as an
equivalent for the dreariness of the
Maremma. He had his reasons for
carrying Gwendolen out of reach, but
they were not reasons that can seem
black in the mere statement. He sus-
pected a growing spirit of opposition
in her, and his feeling about the senti-
mental inclination she betrayed for
Deronda was what in another man he
would have called jealousy. In him.
self it seemed merely a resolution to
put an end to such foolery as must
have been going on in that pre-ar-
ranged visit of Deronda's which he
had OWNED and interrupted.


And Grandcourt might have pleaded
that he was perfectly justified in tax
ing care that his wife should fulfill the
obligations she had accepted. Her
marriage was contract where all the
ostensible advantages we're on her
side, and it was only one Of those ad.
vantages that her husband should use
his power to hinder her from any in
furious self-committal or unsuitable
behavior. He knew quite we'll that
she had not married him-had not
overcome her repugnance to certain
facts-out of love to him personally ;
he had won her by the rank and luxu.
ries he had to give her, and these she
had got; he had fulfulled his side of
the contract.


And Gwendolen, we know, was
thoroughly aware of the situation.
She could not excuse herself by saying
that there had been tacit part of the
contract on her side, namely, that she
meant to rule and have her own way.
With all her early indulgence in the
disposition to dominate, she was not
one Of the narrow-brained women who
through life regard all their own sci.
fish demands as rights, and every
claim upon themselves as an injury.
She had a root of conscience in her,
and the process of purgatory had be.
gun for her on the green earth she
knew that she had been wrong.


But now enter into the soul of this
young creature as she found herself,
with the blue Mediterranean dividing
her from the world, on the tiny plank
island of a yacht, the domain of the
husband to whom she felt that she
had sold herself, and had been paid
the strict price-nay, paid more thar
she had dared to ask in the handsome
maintenance of her mother the hus
band to whom she had sold her truth
fulness and sense of justice, so thai
she held them throttled into silence
collared and dragged behind him tt
witness what he would, without re
monstrance.


What had she to complain of? TIL,
yacht was of the prettiest; the cabi1
fitted up to perfection, smelling O
cedar, soft cushioned, hung with silk
expanded with mirrors the crew suc]