My heart was constricted as by an icy grip during this forced march, for I immediately realized why she had so demonstratively refused to be helped or to be wheeled out in her invalid chair: she wanted to show me, me in particular, to show all of us, that she was a cripple. She wanted, out of a kind of mysterious vindictiveness born of despair, to torture us with her torture, to arraign us, the hale and hearty, in the place of God. But it was this very challenge, this frightful challenge, that made me feel — and a thousand times more acutely than on the occasion of her outburst of despair when
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