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They went on, it is true, to glorify the means above the end; to consecrate childlessness, self-torture, dirt, ignorance, as if they were things pleasing to God and holy in themselves.
Men like myself, of a warm, impetuous nature, complain of the heartlessness of mankind. They fancy themselves peculiarly the victims of an unkind destiny in this respect; and finally cut their throats in a moment of frenzy, or degenerate into a cynicism that delights in contradictions, in sarcasms, in self-torture, and the bitterest hostility to their neighbors.
Even for the nameless gift she found a reason, with a woman's skill, in self-torture. Moor had met Adam, had told his disappointment, and still pitying her Warwick had sent the pretty greeting to console her for the loss of both friend and lover. This thought seemed to sting her into sudden passion.
Now and then, even while she forced herself in public to listen to him, the invincible horror and repugnance she felt would be suddenly revealed by a chance look or intonation and he saw it and writhed in secret. And yet he went everywhere that there was a possibility of meeting her, with a restless impulse of self-torture, while his hate grew more intense day by day.
Nearly all the notable instances of religious austerities and self-torture practised by yogis, and recorded in Hindu legend and history, were undertaken for the purpose of accumulating thereby a great store of merit through which power might be acquired over men or gods.
Only too soon I know it he will again withdraw it from his lips with his own hand, if it were only because the inclination to self-torture which he inherits, the ascetic instinct, that constantly increases in strength, destroys and stamps as sinful forgetfulness of duty every pleasure which he enjoys for any length of time. We will hope that he will not retain this new happiness too briefly.
After that disappointment and it was a grievous disappointment, however self-inflicted especially grievous to such an expert in self-torture her nature grew rapidly and steadily more self-absorbed and unlovely. "My darling little daughter, sometimes I have feared that you may have inherited a similar tendency.
She went through it all, with a certain stern delight in the self-torture, deliberately day by day, year by year, all its lofty aspirations, all its blissful passages, all its deep disappointments, and found in it so she chose to fancy in the wilfulness of her misery nothing but cause for remorse.
Some spun round on their feet with incredible rapidity, as is related of the dervishes. Others ran with their heads against walls, or curved their bodies like rope dancers, so that their heels touched their shoulders." Women figured very prominently among the Convulsionnaires, particularly when the epidemic passed from convulsive dancing to prophecy, and thence to various forms of self-torture.
And in despite of scruple he would before long have obeyed the natural impulse of his heart, had it not been that still graver complications declared themselves, and by exasperating his over-sensitive pride made him reckless of the pain he gave to others so long as his own self-torture was made sufficiently acute.
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