No partiality in the past had persuaded him to imagine that of any woman he had admired. They were just what they were—dainty, lovely, brilliant, bewitching; but nothing more to him than to any one who had a taste for them.
But here at last was the woman made for him, mad for him: warm with that fugitive spirit of sense which was in her only and for him alone.
He knew that, though he knew not how he knew it, as certainly, as responsively as a lock knows the wards of its key.
It was as a key that she had entered him; and within him, at her moving, the levers of a secret life had stirred—a strange new complexity of being which no mortal influence had disturbed before.
She had revealed to him all that life had not yielded him, all that now it could never yield, a correlation undreamed of between man and woman.
And she had come curiously too late. That was his bitterness. He would have sacrificed for her every other allegiance of the past, save this one which brought him no pleasure. From Lettice Nevern he could only come to her as a man debased for ever in his own esteem. Nothing could excuse such a betrayal, nothing could redeem him after it was done.
Happiness with the woman he must marry was out of the question; but happiness without her was now for him equally uncompassable. He had a choice only between two sorts of despair. Under such conditions it seemed improbable that he would prove a very cheerful companion, but such predictions were with Caragh especially difficult. His humour was always available for his own misfortunes, and in this case his fortune was too deplorable not to be concealed.
Since it entirely absorbed his unconscious thoughts his attention always seemed preoccupied; an abstraction which lent however, an agreeable effect of detachment from ordinary worries.
He was, perhaps for that reason, the serenest member of the ship's company, and the one most obligingly at the service of other men's affairs.
But on this windy morning he was allowed to reflect on his own adversities, till a shout from forward called his eyes towards the shore.