The tragic ending of his hopes was the outcome, he had little doubt, of his last visit to the other woman. She saw him then as hers no longer; saw in him too, perhaps, in spite of his concealments, a radiance which her love had never wrought, and realized, with cruel clearness, how entirely he was another's.
And so, inflamed with jealousy beyond endurance, she had determined that no one should possess him if she might not, and had used her pain, malignantly, to poison the other's pleasure.
That poison took no doubt at first the form of hints; a woman's pitying innuendoes, which had roused the girl's suspicions and been the cause of her demands. And when she repeated his disclaimer, further proofs, he supposed, were mentioned, and finally the letters had been produced.
As the story of those two short weeks took shape in his mind—the profitless destruction done to his life and to another's by a woman's venomous malice—he could, in the fierceness of his despair, have made an end to her with his naked hands.
At that, ashamed of himself, he smiled, remembering the frequent vaunting of her pride and the affectations of her honour. This was strange work for either of them. But then a woman's honour was so detachable.
She had it if you had it; and if you hadn't it, neither had she. In that way her morality never placed her at a disadvantage. She could always be as noble or as mean as her opponent.
He smiled again, more grimly, to think that on him of all men such a fate had fallen. That he who all his life had shrunk from women should be execrated as a philanderer! Surely ironic comedy could go no further?
And to consider, beside it, the kind of man, for whom London is too small a harem, wedded gratefully, reverently, every day, by the kind of woman who found him unworthy, the kind of man, alas! to whom all too probably, to appease that terrible vanity of a trumpeted indifference, she might fall: to the first brute who desired to possess her.
Her fineness would not save her! Had it ever saved a woman yet from such a fate? By the blaze of his wrath he seemed to see the reason.
Woman had no fineness, no sensibility, no subtlety of discernment. Her fastidiousness was an affectation, like the cut of her skirt: she wore each because it was the fashion. It was made for her, not by her, and was no part of her at all.