To
move nearer to God, he must move towards his miners, his life must
gravitate towards theirs. They were, unconsciously, his idol, his God
made manifest. In them he worshipped the highest, the great,
sympathetic, mindless Godhead of humanity.
And all the while, his wife had opposed him like one of the great
demons of hell. Strange, like a bird of prey, with the fascinating
beauty and abstraction of a hawk, she had beat against the bars of his
philanthropy, and like a hawk in a cage, she had sunk into silence. By
force of circumstance, because all the world combined to make the cage
unbreakable, he had been too strong for her, he had kept her prisoner.
And because she was his prisoner, his passion for her had always
remained keen as death. He had always loved her, loved her with
intensity. Within the cage, she was denied nothing, she was given all
licence.
But she had gone almost mad. Of wild and overweening temper, she could
not bear the humiliation of her husband's soft, half-appealing kindness
to everybody.
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