"Florence had found that Edward for the first time in his life was really finally in love with a young girl called Nancy Rufford.
"For every man there comes at last a time of life when the woman who then sets her seal upon his imagination has set her seal for good. He travels over no more horizons ... that was the case with Edward and the poor girl."
Anyway that was the end of Florence. "You have no idea how quite extraordinarily for me that was the end of Florence. From that day to this I have never given her another thought ... she just went completely out of existence, like yesterday's paper.... It was as if an immensely heavy knapsack had fallen off my shoulders. I was in love with Nancy Rufford—I who was forty-five and she twenty-two, a miracle of patience who could be almost miraculously impatient."
Edward then began to drink heavily, owing to his frustrated passion for her: she looked on him as an uncle and he could not make love to her and it was killing him.
The chronicler at this stage goes over his tracks as he often does to give us the earlier history of Leonora and Edward, who had come together in an extraordinary state of innocence. He had admired her for her truthfulness, her cleanness of mind, the clean-run-ness of her limbs, the fairness of her skin, the gold of her hair, her religion, her sense of duty. But she failed to have for him a touch of magnetism, while in her admiration for his qualities soon became love of the deepest description. "There could not have been a happier girl for five or six years." They never had any children: they did not even know how they were produced for some years after their marriage. He came to regard her as physically and mentally cold: she wished for the child that never came. Meanwhile after the episode of the servant girl Edward could not have a mistress without falling violently in love with her; but the Spanish dancer cured him of that. The passion that he had for her arose "like fire in dry corn" ... and from the moment of his unfaithfulness with her Leonora never acted the part of wife to him, though there were moments when she was within a hair of yielding to her physical passion for him. She had the vague, passionate idea that when Edward had exhausted a number of other types of women he must turn to her.... Florence knocked all that on the head.
The cleverest and most interesting thing in the book is the masterly way in which the narrator manages to convey to us all the points of view of everybody concerned—Leonora's, Edward's, Florence's and his own.
Never till the moment when Florence began to gain ascendency over Edward did Leonora despair of getting him back. But when she saw Florence lay her hand upon Edward's wrist she knew that that touching of hands gave that woman an irrevocable claim—to be seduced. And she so despised Florence that she would have preferred it to be a parlour-maid. But she said nothing to Florence's husband. She had to give Edward to understand "that if ever I came to know of his intrigue she would ruin him beyond repair." And then Florence had died, and the girl Nancy with whom the narrator is in love becomes the object of Edward's fiercest passion: his love for her threatened to kill him and she knew ... and she offered him herself and he could not accept the offer of her virtue and they sent her back to her father in India.
"'You can't let that man,' said Leonora, 'go on to ruin for want of you. You must belong to him.'
"'I knew you would come to that,' answered Nancy very slowly. 'But we are not worth it—Edward and I.'"
And because she wouldn't Edward killed himself and Nancy went mad: they sent the narrator out to bring Nancy home.