Time passed, and he grew weary, even of the very excess of his happiness—even of the amiability, the sweetness, the ever-yielding gentleness of his Theresa. That she should so long have charmed one so rash and reckless was the real wonder, not that she should now have lost the power of charming him.
Nevertheless so it was; the mind of Jasper was not so constituted as to rest very long content with any thing, least of all with tranquillity—
and his, surely, was of the hottest. He began as of old to long for excitement; and even the pleasures of the chase, to which he was still devoted, began to prove insufficient to gratify his wild and eager spirit. Day after day, Theresa saw less of him, and ere long knew not how or where many of his days were spent. Confidence, in the true sense of the word, there never had been between them; respect or esteem, founded upon her real virtues and rare excellences, he had never felt—therefore, when the heat and fierceness of passion died out, as it were, by the consumption of its own fuel, when her personal charms palled on him by possession, when her intellectual endowments wearied him, because they were in truth far beyond the range of his comprehension, and therefore out of the pale of his sympathies, he had nothing left whereon to build affection—thus passion once dead in his heart, all was gone at once which had bound him to Theresa.
He neglected her, he left her alone—alone, without a companion, a friend, in the wide world. Still she complained not, wept not, above all, upbraided not. She sought to occupy herself, to amuse her solitude with her books, her music, her wild flights into the world of fancy. And when he did come home from his fierce, frantic gallops across the country with the worst and wildest of the young yeomanry, from his disgraceful orgies with the half gentry of the nearest market-town, she received him ever with kindness, gentleness and love.
She never let him know that she wept in silence; never allowed him to see that she noticed his altered manner; but smiled on him, and sang to him, and fondled him, as if he had been to her—and was he not so?—all that she had on earth. And he, such is the spirit of the selfish and the reckless of our sex, almost began to hate her, for the very meekness and affection with which she submitted to his unkindness.