Her mental weakness seemed to have made tenderness from him an impossibility.

He could not bear with her.

It was as though he resented in her the likeness to one beloved whom he mourned as dead.
Possibly he had never wholly forgiven her marriage--that disastrous marriage that had broken her life.

Possibly her clouded brain was to him a source of suffering which drove him to hardness.

He had ever been impatient of weakness, and what he deemed hysteria was wholly beyond his endurance; and the spectacle of the one being who had been so much to him crushed beneath a sorrow the very existence of which he resented was one which he had never been able to contemplate with either pity or tolerance.