Self-Humiliation

Now, Julia lacked this earnestness, this intensity. Accustomed
to submission, her manner was habitually subdued. Her strongest
utterance was a tear, and that was most frequently hidden. She did
not respond to me in the language in which my affections were wont
to speak. Sincerity she did not lack--far from it--she was truth
itself! It is the keener pang to my conscience now, that I am
compelled to admit this conviction. Her modes of utterance were
not less true than mine. They were not less significant of truth;
but they were after a different fashion. In a moment of calm and
reason, I might have believed this truth; nay, I knew it, even at
those moments when I was most unjust. It was not the truth that I
required so much as the presence of an attachment which could equal
mine in its degree and strength. This was not in her nature. She
was one taught to subdue her nature, to repress the tendencies of
her heart, to submit in silence and in meekness. She had invariably
done so until the insane urgency of her mother made her desperate.
But for this desperation she had still submitted, perhaps, had never
been my wife. In the fervent intensity of my own love, I fancied,
from the beginning, that there was something too temperate in the
tone of hers. Were I to be examined now, on this point, I should
say that her deportment was one which declared the nicest union
of sensibility and maidenly propriety. But, compared with mine,
her passions were feeble, frigid. Mine were equally intense and
exacting. Perhaps, had she even responded to my impetuosity with
a like fervor, I should have recoiled from her with a feeling of
disgust much more rapid and much more legitimate, than was that of
my present frenzy.