Blanche Stroeve was in the cruel grip of appetite.Perhaps she hated Strickland still, but she hungered for him, and everything that had made up her life till then became of no account.She ceased to be a woman, complex, kind and petulant, considerate and thoughtless; she was a Maenad.She was desire.
But perhaps this is very fanciful; and it may be that she was merely bored with her husband and went to Strickland out of a callous curiosity.She may have had no particular feeling for him, but succumbed to his wish from propinquity or idleness, to find then that she was powerless in a snare of her own contriving.How did I know what were the thoughts and emotions behind that placid brow and those cool gray eyes?
But if one could be certain of nothing in dealing with creatures so incalculable as human beings, there were explanations of Blanche Stroeve's behaviour which were at all events plausible.On the other hand, I did not understand Strickland at all.I racked my brain, but could in no way account for an action so contrary to my conception of him.It was not strange that he should so heartlessly have betrayed his friends' confidence, nor that he hesitated not at all to gratify a whim at the cost of another's misery.That was in his character.He was a man without any conception of gratitude.He had no compassion.The emotionscommon to most of us simply did not exist in him, and it was as absurd to blame him for not feeling them as for blaming the tiger because he is fierce and cruel. But it was the whim I could not understand.
I could not believe that Strickland had fallen in love with Blanche Stroeve.I did not believe him capable of love.That is an emotion in which tenderness is an essential part, but Strickland had no tenderness either for himself or for others; there is in love a sense of weakness, a desire to protect, an eagerness to do good and to give pleasure -- if not unselfishness, at all events a selfishness which marvellously conceals itself; it has in it a certain diffidence.These were not traits which I could imagine in Strickland.Love is absorbing; it takes the lover out of himself; the most clear-sighted, though he may know, cannot realise that his love will cease; it gives body to what he knows is illusion, and, knowing it is nothing else, he loves it better than reality.It makes a man a little more than himself, and at the same time a little less.He ceases to be himself.He is no longer an individual, but a thing, an instrument to some purpose foreign to his ego.Love is never quite devoid of sentimentality, and Strickland was the least inclined to that infirmity of any man I have known.I could not believe that he would ever suffer that possession of himself which love is; he could never endure a foreign yoke.I believed him capable of uprooting from his heart, though it might be with agony, so that he was left battered and ensanguined, anything that came between himself and that uncomprehended craving that urged him constantly to he knew not what.If I have succeeded at all in giving the complicated impression that Strickland made on me, it will not seem outrageous to say that I felt he was at once too great and too small for love.
But I suppose that everyone's conception of the passion is formed on his own idiosyncrasies, and it is different with every different person.A man like Strickland would love in a manner peculiar to himself.It was vain to seek the analysis of his emotion.
