It must also be confessed that her dislike and fear of Gladys had grown to dimensions bordering upon monomania. The elder girl at once hypnotized and paralyzed her. Her sensuality, her feline caprices, her elaborately cherished hatred, reduced the Italian to such helpless misery, that any change--even the horror of this marriage--assumed the likeness of a desirable relief. It is also true that by gradual degrees,--for women, however little prone to abstract thought, are quick to turn the theories of those they love into living practice,--she had come to regard the mere physical terror of this momentous plunge as a less insurmountable barrier than she had felt at first. Without precisely intending it, Mr. Quincunx had really, in a measure--particularly since he himself had come to frequent the society of Luke Andersen--achieved what might have conventionally been called the “corruption” of Lacrima’s mind. She found herself on several occasions imagining what she would really feel, if, escaped for an afternoon from her Priory duties, she were slipping off to meet her friend in Camel’s Cover or Badger’s Bottom. When the suggestion had been first made to her of this monstrous marriage, it had seemed nothing short of a sentence of death, and beyond the actual consummation of it, she had never dreamed of looking. But all this had now imperceptibly changed. Many an evening as she sat with her work by Mrs. Romer’s side, watching Gladys and her father play cards, the thought came over her that she might just as well enjoy the comparative independence of having her own house and her own associations--even though the price of them _were_ the society of such a lump of clay--as live this wretched half-life without hope or aim. Other moods arrived when the thought of having children of her own came to her with something more than a mere sense of escape; came to her with the enlargement of an opening horizon. She recalled the many meandering discourses which Mr. Quincunx had addressed to her upon this subject. They had not affected her woman’s instincts; but they had lodged in her mind. A girl’s children, so her friend had often maintained, do not belong to the father at all. The father is nothing--a mere irrelevant incident, a mere chance. The mother alone--the mother always--has the rights and pleasures, as she has the responsibilities and pains of the parental relation. She even recalled one occasion of twilight philosophizing in the potato-bed, when Mr. Quincunx had gone so far as to maintain the unscientific thesis that children, born where there is no love, inherit character, appearance, tastes, everything--from the mother.