It was the first time in his life that a woman had really mattered or had been impossible to obtain.
He had always looked upon them as delightful accessories: sport first, and woman, who was only another form of sport, second.
He had not neglected the obligations of his great position, but they came naturally to him as of the day's work. They were not real interests in his life. And when stripped of the veneer of civilization he was but a passionate, primitive creature, like numbers of others of his class and age.
While the elevation of Theodora's pure soul was an actual influence upon him, he had thought it would be possible—difficult, perhaps—but possible to obey her—to keep from troubling her—to regulate his passion into worship at a distance. But since then new influences had begun to work—prominent among them being jealousy.
To see her surrounded by others—who were men and would desire her, too—drove him mad.
Josiah was difficult enough to bear. The thought that he was her husband, and had the rights of this position, always turned him sick with raging disgust; but that was the law, and a law accepted since the beginning of time. These others were not of the law—they were the same as himself—and would all try to win her.
He had no fear of their succeeding, but, to watch them trying, and he himself unable to prevent them, was a thought he could not tolerate.
He had no settled plan. He did not deliberately say to himself: "I will possess her at all costs. I will be her lover, and take her by force from the bonds of this world." His whole mind was in a ferment and chaos. There was no time to think of the position in cold blood. His passion hurried him on from hour to hour.
This day after the opera, when the hideous impossibility of the situation had come upon him with full force, he felt as Lancelot—
"His mood was often like a fiend, and rose and drove him into wastes and solitudes for agony,
Who was yet a living soul."