She herself was conscious that she had answered him with less feeling, with less sympathy than he might well have looked for from her, but the momentary sense of offence with which she had heard him speak had been too strong to allow her gentler instincts to prevail with her. She was irritated, amazed, profoundly offended, and amazed with such grand vanity of amazement as Cleopatra might have felt had some memory of poor pale Octavia risen up betwixt her lover and herself.
He meanwhile went through the hushed dim corridors of the house with a pang the more at his heart. He had spoken in a moment of strong feeling, of freshly-awakened pain, and the coldness with which his confidence had been received, left its own frost upon his soul. He did not remember that which every man finds; that no sorrow for one woman will ever awaken sympathy in the breast of another. Shame, suffering, wounds of the world's scorn or fortune's cruelties will make all women compassionate and tender; but when a man sighs for a woman lost, he will meet with no pity from those women whom he loves. He did not think of that; he only felt a bruised and baffled sense of utter loneliness; a momentary weakness like that of a child who, being hurt, creeps up to arms it loves only to be repulsed from them. That weary sense of hopelessness which her lovers had so often felt before her came to him; such hopelessness as may come over the soul of one who, standing shipwrecked on some barren shore, is fronted by some steep, straight, inaccessible wall of marble cliff, upon whose smooth white breast there is no place for any aching foot to rest or any hand to close: a white wall shining in the sun which sees men drown and die.
Some lines of Swinburne's earliest and greatest years came back in vaguely remembered fragments to his mind.
Yea, though we sung as angels in her ear,
She would not hear.
Let us rise up and part; she will not know,
Let us go seaward as the great winds go,