desire to escape from memory, to emerge from the gulf. In this troubled,
impatient disorder of mind and feeling, she hurried into a second
marriage as fatal as the first.

For a while she bore patiently all the privations of that ascetic
household, assisted in all those external formalities, centred all her
intellect within that iron range of existence. But no grace descended on
her soul,--no warm ray unlocked the ice of the well. Then, gradually
becoming aware of the niggardly meanness, of the harsh, uncharitable
judgments, of the decorous frauds that, with unconscious hypocrisy, her
husband concealed beneath the robes of sanctity, a weary disgust stole
over her,--it stole, it deepened, it increased; it became intolerable
when she discovered that Braddell had knowingly deceived her as to his
worldly substance. In that mood in which she had rushed into these
ominous nuptials, she had had no thought for vulgar advantages; had
Braddell been a beggar, she had married him as rashly. But he, with the
inability to comprehend a nature like hers,--dim not more to her terrible
vices than to the sinister grandeur which made their ordinary
atmosphere,--had descended cunningly to address the avarice he thought as
potent in others as himself, to enlarge on the worldly prosperity with
which Providence had blessed him; and now she saw that her dowry alone
had saved the crippled trader from the bankrupt list. With this revolting
discovery, with the scorn it produced, vanished all Lucretia's unstable
visions of reform. She saw this man a saint amongst his tribe, and would
not believe in the virtues of his brethren, great and unquestionable as
they might have been proved to a more dispassionate and humbler inquirer.
The imposture she detected she deemed universal in the circle in which
she dwelt; and Satan once more smiled upon the subject he regained.
Lucretia became a mother; but their child formed no endearing tie between
the ill-assorted pair,--it rather embittered their discord. Dimly even