Double Harness by Antonio Hope — Read

There are processes undergone which people hardly realise themselves, which another can explain by no record, however minute or laborious. They are in detail as imperceptible, as secret, as elusive as the physical changes which pass upon the face of the body. From day to day there is no difference; but days make years, and years change youth to maturity, maturity to decay. So in matters of the soul the daily trifling sum adds up and up. A thousand tiny hopes nipped, a thousand little expectations frustrated, a thousand foolish fears proved not so foolish. Divide them by the days, and there is nothing to cry about at bedtime, nothing even to pray about, if to pray you are inclined. Yet as a month passes, or two, or three, the atoms seem to join and form a cloud. The sunbeams get through here and there still, but the clear fine radiance is obscured. Presently the cloud thickens, deepens, hardens. It seems now a wall, stout and high; the gates are heavy and forbidding, and they stand where once there was ready and eagerly welcomed entrance and access. Think of what it is to look for a letter sometimes. It comes not on Monday -- it's nothing; nor on Tuesday -- it's nothing; nor on Wednesday -- odd! nor on Thursday -- strange! nor on Friday -- you can't think! It comes not for a week -- you are hurt; for a fortnight -- you are indignant. A month passes -- and maybe what you prized most in all your life is gone. You have been told the truth in thirty broken sentences.

Sibylla Imason took a reckoning -- in no formal manner, not sitting down to it, still less in any flash of inspiration or on the impulse of any startling incident. As she went to and fro on her work and her pleasure, the figures gradually and insensibly set themselves in rows, added and subtracted themselves, and presented her with the quotient. It was against her will that all this happened. She would have had none of it; there was nothing to recommend it; it was not even unusual. But it would come -- and what did it come to? Nothing alarming or vulgar or sensational. Grantley's gallantry forbade that, his good manners, his affectionate ways, his real love for her. It was forbidden too by the moments of rapture which she excited and which she shared; they were still untouched -- the fairy rides on fairy horses. But is not the virtue of such things to mean more than they are -- to be not incidents, but rather culminations -- not exceptions, but the very type, the highest expression, of what is always there? Even the raptures she was coming to doubt while she welcomed, to mistrust while she shared. Would she come at once to hate and to strive after them?