People
congratulated me on getting rid of a brute, and thought I was all right
and ought to be happy. But the newspapers and the world never knew what
I had gone through, the real horrors, before I insisted on release. You
started when I called my husband a brute just now, Dr. Levillier; I
noticed it. The phrase hurt you, coming from any wife about any husband.
I know why, a boy once told me that his mother was always drunk. He hurt
me then into hating him for the rest of my days. But I called a stranger
a brute, not the man I loved and married, not the man I loved after I
married him. Dr. Levillier, do you believe in possessions?"
She had been gradually getting excited while she spoke, and, on the last
words, she leaned forward in her chair and struck her hand down in her
lap.
"Do you mean possession by the devil?" said the doctor, very quietly,
opposing a strong calm to her intensity.
"Yes. I do. My experience obliges me to. I knew, for a year before I
married him, I married, I lived for two years after I married him, with
a man who was my conception of what a man should be, strong, gentle,
tender, brave, a hero to me. I got rid of a devil, after I had endured
two years of torture at his hands. It is no use to tell me those two
distinct men I knew were one and the same man.
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