She had no taste for home, no appetite for healthful
food; she ran me into debt, hated my friends, loved my enemies, and
changed her soft looks into daggers to stab me with. Her bloom became
blight; her lips oozed out poison, and she dabbled in corrupt things. I
tracked her footsteps from my sacred couch as they led to the very brink
of the grave.
'O, my son, beware of your partner in the dance of life; for, as Mahomet
used to say, in his jocular moods, 'those who will dance must pay the
fiddler.' To be tied, forever, for better, for worse, to such a ---- as
Amina Ghoul, is to be transformed in one's whole nature. It is the
transmigration of a soul from amiability to peevishness, from activity
to discouragement, from love to hate, and from high-souled sentiment to
the dog-kennel of humility. Go thou, and don't do likewise.
'Woe is me! Who takes one wrong step, gets out of it by another; and so
I went on from enchantment to enchantment, and fell out of the
frying-pan into the fire. If I stood erect, and no longer groveled, if I
was not any more a beast, I became like the devils which possessed them.
So did I scourge and lash the object of my hatred with feelings of the
deadliest revenge.
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