Looking back, Mrs. Clarke realized that the definite change in Dion, which marked the beginning of a new development, dated from the night in the garden at Buyukderer when Jimmy had so nearly learnt the truth. On that night she had forced Dion to save her reputation with her child by lying and playing the hypocrite to a boy who looked up to him and trusted in him. Dion had not forgotten his obedience. Perhaps he hated her because of it in some secret place of his soul. She was sure that he intended to make her pay for it. He had obeyed her in what she considered as a very trifling matter. (For of course Jimmy had to be deceived.) But since then he had often shown a bitter, even sometimes a brutal, disposition to make her obey him. She could not fully understand the measure of his resentment because she had none of his sense of honor and did not share his instinctive love of truth. But she knew he had suffered acutely in tricking and lying to Jimmy.
On that night, then, he had burnt his boats. She herself had told him to do it when she had said to him, “Give yourself wholly to me.” She was beginning to regret that she had ever said that.
At first, in her perversity, she had curiously enjoyed Dion’s misery. It had wrapped him in a garment that was novel. It had thrown about him a certain romance. But now she was becoming weary of it. She had had enough of it and enough of him. That horrible process, which she knew so well, had repeated itself once more: she had wanted a thing; she had striven for it; she had obtained it; she had enjoyed it (for she knew well how to enjoy and never thought that the game was not worth the candle). And then, by slow, almost imperceptible degrees, her power of enjoyment had begun to lessen. Day by day it had lost in strength. She had tried to stimulate it, to deceive herself about its decay, but the time had come, as it had come to her many times in the past, when she had been forced to acknowledge to herself that it was no longer living but a corpse. Dion Leith had played his part in her life. She wished now to put him outside of her door. She had made sacrifices for him; for him she had run risks. All that was very well so long as he had had the power to reward her. But now she was beginning to brood over those risks, those sacrifices, with resentment, to magnify them in her mind; she was beginning to be angry as she dwelt upon that which distortedly she thought of as her unselfishness.
After Jimmy had left Turkey to go back to Eton, and the summer had died, Mrs. Clarke had fulfilled her promise to Dion. She had settled at Pera for the winter, and she had arranged his life for him. From the moment of Jimmy’s departure Dion had given himself entirely to her. He had even given himself with a sort of desperation. She had been aware of his fierce concentration, and she had tasted it with a keenness of pleasure, she had savored it deliberately and fully in the way of an epicure. The force of his resolution towards evil—it was just that—had acted upon her abominably sensitive temperament as a strong tonic. That period had been the time when, to her, the game was worth the candle, was worth a whole blaze of candles.
Already, then, Dion had begun to show the new difficult man whom she, working hand in hand with sorrow, had helped to create within him; but she had at first enjoyed his crudities of temper, his occasional outbursts of brutality, his almost fierce roughness and the hardness which alternated with his moments of passion.
She had understood that he was flinging away with furious hands all the baggage of virtue he had clung to in the past, that he was readjusting his life, was reversing all the habits which had been familiar and natural to him in the existence with Rosamund. So much the better, she had thought. The fact that he was doing this proved to her her power over him. She had smiled, in her unsmiling way, upon his efforts to do what she had told him to do, to cut away the cancer that was in him and to cut away all that was round it. Away with the old moralities, the old hatred of lies and deceptions, the old love of sanity and purity of life.
But away, too, with the old reverence for, and worship of, the woman possessed.
Dion had taken to heart a maxim once uttered to him by Mrs. Clarke in the garden at Buyukderer. Mention had been made of the very foolish and undignified conduct of a certain woman in Pera society who had been badly treated by a young diplomat. In discussing the matter Dion had chanced to say:
“But if she does such things how can any man respect her?”
Mrs. Clarke’s reply, spoken with withering sarcasm, had been: