Sooner an open quarrel than such mockery of friendship!—so he thought.
He remained where she had left him, sunk in meditation, which retraced one by one the passages of his love for her. It had been love so great, so entire, so intense, that it could never change—unless she or her own will killed it. It had been one of those mighty incantations of which no hand but the sorcerer's own can ever lift off the spell.
As her lover he had always imagined that she, marble to all others, would be wax to him; he had always believed that he would light the flame of fervour behind the alabaster-like ice of her temperament. But he had learned his error. He had found that possession is not necessarily empire. He had discovered that he pleased her intelligence and her vanity rather than awakened her senses or her emotions. She had made him mortifyingly conscious that she found him of no higher stature than other men, and had unsparingly reminded him that there was no more fatal foe of love than familiarity.
She had wounded him more than she had meant more than once, and this time the wound penetrated both his pride and his affections, and left with him an acrid sense of undeserved humiliation.
'No man can have been truer to her than I have been,' he thought, with that pathetic wonder that fidelity does not beget gratitude which is common to all lovers, be they man or woman.
Was it true that she would not care if his fancy wandered elsewhere? Would she not feel any anger were he, like all his friends, to spend his passions and his substance in the arms of cocottes, and in providing the splendours of their palaces? Would she indeed feel no pang if any other woman, whether duchess or drôlesse, were to obtain empire over him?
If not, then truly she had never loved him. He felt no impulse to put her to the test: he only felt a weary and dreary sense of loneliness, of discomfiture, of chagrin, of humiliation.
He had always doubted whether she had ever realised the depth and the extent of the passion he had spent on her. He had always fancied that she classed it only with the hot desires and romantic sentiments of men, of which she had seen so much; there might be even many of those men who appeared to her to have been truer lovers than he. He had married her: would Helen have ever believed that Menelaus could love like Paris? Surely not. There had been many men whose blood had been spilled like water on the ground for her sake, or from her caprice. It was inevitable that there should seem truer lovers than he who dwelt under the same roof as herself, and led the even tenour of his daily life beside her.
She had been too early saturated and satiated with the spectacle of strong and forbidden passions for the repetition of a well-known and often-laughed-at love to have any power to excite her interest in the tame sameness of a permitted and undisturbed intimacy. He felt that she had spoken the entire truth when she had said that she would have cared for him much more had she never married him. She required endless novelty, incessant renewal of excitation, continual stimulant to her love of mystery, of peril, and of power. There was no food for these in the calm certainty of possession which is the accompaniment and enemy of all conjugal life, in the tranquil succession of years which resembled one another monotonous as peace.
Perhaps she had loved him most of all on that day when she had written to him that their paths in life must wend for ever apart. It had been a bon moment, a moment of exaltation, of intensity, of strong interest, stimulated by a sense of self-sacrifice; a moment in which she had put him voluntarily away from her; and, so doing, had seen him in a light which had never before or after shone upon him in her eyes.