Aaron's rod

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AARON'S ROD
The agony of her long, long desire for him. He was a passionate
lover. He gave her, ostensibly,
all she asked for.
He withheld from her nothing, no experience, no degree of
intimacy. She was his initiate, or he hers.
And yet, oh, horror for a woman, he withheld everything
from her. He withheld the very centre of himself. For a
long time, she never realised. She was dazed and maddened
only. But as months of married experience passed into years
of married torment, she began to understand. It was that,
after their most tremendous, and, it seemed to her, heaven-
rending passion yea, when for her every veil seemed rent
and a terrible and sacred creative darkness covered the earth
then after all this wonder and miracle in crept a poisonous
grey snake of disillusionment, a poisonous grey snake of disillusion
that bit her to madness, so that she really was a mad
woman, demented.
Why? Why? He never gave himself.
her, really. He withheld himself. Yes,
He never came to
in those supreme
and sacred times which for her were the whole culmination
of life and being, the ecstasy of unspeakable passional conjunction,
he was not really hers. He was withheld. He
withheld the central core of himself, like the devil and hell-
fiend he was. He cheated and made play with her tremen-
dous passional soul, her sacred sex passion, most sacred of
all things for a woman. All the time, some central part of
him stood apart from her, aside, looking on.
Oh, agony and horror for a passionate, fierce-hearted
woman! She who loved him. She who loved him to mad-
ness. She who would have died for him. She who did die
with him, many terrible and magnificent connubial deaths,
in his arms, her husband.
Her husband! How bitter the word grew to her! Her
husband! and him never once given, given wholly to her!
Her husband and in all the frenzied finality of desire, she
never fully possessed him, not once. No, not once. As time
went on, she learned it for inevitable. Not once!
And then, how she hated him! Cheated, foiled, betrayed,
forced to love him or to hate him: never able to be at peace