Though a life of lonely, ill-
paid toil would have been better for Edith than marriage to Gus, he
was missing the one golden opportunity of his life, when he thought of
Edith Allen in other character than his wife. God uses instruments,
and she alone could give him a chance of being a man among men. In his
meditated baseness toward her, he aimed a fatal blow at his own life.
And this is ever true of sins against the human brotherhood. The
recoil of a blow struck at another's interests has often the
retributive wrath of heaven in it, and the selfish soul that would
destroy a fellow-creature for its own pleasure is itself destroyed.
False pride, false education, helpless, unskilled hands, an untaught,
unbraced moral nature, made strong, resolute, beautiful Edith Allen so
weak, so untrue to herself, that she was ready to throw herself away
on so thin a shadow of a man as Gus Elliot. She might have known,
indeed she half feared, that wretchedness would follow such a union.
It is torment to a large strong-souled woman to despise utterly the
man to whom she is chained. She revolts at his weakness and
irresolution, and the probabilities are that she will sink into that
worst phase of feminine drudgery, the supporting of a husband, who,
though able, will not work, and that she will become that social
monster of whom it is said with a significant laugh:
"She is the man of the house.
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