CHAPTER XXVII 386
and lavishly displayed for my pleasure her charms and accomplishments . All the men in her circle seemed to admire her and envy me . I was dazzled , stimulated : my senses were excited ; and being ignorant , raw , and inexperienced , I thought I loved her . There is no folly so besotted that the idiotic rivalries of society , the prurience , the rashness , the blindness of youth , will not hurry a man to its commission . Her relatives encouraged me ; competitors piqued me ; she allured me : a marriage was achieved almost before I knew where I was . Oh , I have no respect for myself when I think of that act ! -- an agony of inward contempt masters me . I never loved , I never esteemed , I did not even know her . I was not sure of the existence of one virtue in her nature : I had marked neither modesty , nor benevolence , nor candour , nor refinement in her mind or manners -- and , I married her : - gross , grovelling , mole-eyed blockhead that I was ! With less sin I might have -- But let me remember to whom I am speaking ."
" My bride ' s mother I had never seen : I understood she was dead . The honeymoon over , I learned my mistake ; she was only mad , and shut up in a lunatic asylum . There was a younger brother , too -- a complete dumb idiot . The elder one , whom you have seen ( and whom I cannot hate , whilst I abhor all his kindred , because he has some grains of affection in his feeble mind , shown in the continued interest he takes in his wretched sister , and also in a dog-like attachment he once bore me ), will probably be in the same state one day . My father and my brother Rowland knew all this ; but they thought only of the thirty thousand pounds , and joined in the plot against me ."
" These were vile discoveries ; but except for the treachery of concealment , I should have made them no subject of reproach to my wife , even when I found her nature wholly alien to mine , her tastes obnoxious to me , her cast of mind common , low , narrow , and singularly incapable of being led to anything higher , expanded to anything larger -- when I found that I could not pass a single evening , nor even a single hour of the day with her in comfort ; that kindly conversation could not be sustained between us , because whatever topic I started , immediately received from her a turn at once coarse and trite , perverse and imbecile -- when I perceived that I should never have a quiet or settled household , because no servant would