one shape or another, stamps ineffaceably on all her productions,
either to imply that they are temporary and finite, or that their
perfection must be wrought by toil and pain. The crimson hand
expressed the ineludible gripe in which mortality clutches the
highest and purest of earthly mould, degrading them into kindred
with the lowest, and even with the very brutes, like whom their
visible frames return to dust. In this manner, selecting it as
the symbol of his wife's liability to sin, sorrow, decay, and
death, Aylmer's sombre imagination was not long in rendering the
birthmark a frightful object, causing him more trouble and horror
than ever Georgiana's beauty, whether of soul or sense, had given
him delight.

At all the seasons which should have been their happiest, he
invariably and without intending it, nay, in spite of a purpose
to the contrary, reverted to this one disastrous topic. Trifling
as it at first appeared, it so connected itself with innumerable
trains of thought and modes of feeling that it became the central
point of all. With the morning twilight Aylmer opened his eyes
upon his wife's face and recognized the symbol of imperfection;
and when they sat together at the evening hearth his eyes
wandered stealthily to her cheek, and beheld, flickering with the
blaze of the wood fire, the spectral hand that wrote mortality
where he would fain have worshipped. Georgiana soon learned to
shudder at his gaze. It needed but a glance with the peculiar
expression that his face often wore to change the roses of her
cheek into a deathlike paleness, amid which the crimson hand was
brought strongly out, like a bass-relief of ruby on the whitest
marble.