"hussyskep" was nothing better than mercenary grubbing; her adhesion to
her hodden-grey was vulgar affectation; and as to her monologues, they
were evidence of insanity. Such changes in reference to other objects
happen to every one of us every day in the year, only we don't look at
and examine them; nor, if we did, could we reconcile them to any theory
of the mind--all that we can say being, that if we love a certain
object, we hate any other which comes between us and our gratification;
and thus, just as Mr. Thomas Dodds loved Mrs. Mary Blyth, so in an equal
ratio he hated his good helpmate Jenny. And then began that other
wonderful process called reconciliation, whereby the wish gradually
overcomes scruples through the cunning mean of falsifying their aspects.
Whereunto, again, the new mistress contributed in the adroit way of all
such wretches--instilling into his ear the moral poison which deadened
the apperception of these scruples at the same time that it brought out
the advantages of disregarding them. The result of all which was, that
Jenny's husband, of whom she had made a slave, for his own good and
benefit, as she thought, and not without reason, arrived, by small
degrees, and by relays of new motives, one after another, at the
conclusion of actually removing her from this big world, and of course
also from that little one to her so dear, even that of her household
empire.

A resolution this, which, terrible and revolting as it may appear to
those who are happily beyond the influence of "the wish," was far more
easily formed than executed; for Nature--although improvident herself of
her children, swallowing them up in thousands by earthquakes, tearing
them by machinery, and drowning them in the sea by shiploads--is very
careful to defend one of them against another. Every scheme the husband
could think of was surrounded with difficulties, and one by one was laid
aside, till he came to that of precipitating his faithful Jenny, as if