When singing some of his songs, she had caught a look in people’s eyes, a pitying look, and she could not help wondering if they thought that she liked such commonplace, or worse still, if they thought that she was obliged to sing it.  But when she had remembered all he had done for her, it seemed quite a disgrace that she should hate to sing his songs.  It was the one thing she could do to please him, and she reflected on her selfishness.  She seemed to have no moral qualities; the idea she had expressed to Ulick regarding the necessity of chastity in women returned, and she felt sure that in women at least every other virtue is dependent on that virtue.  But when Owen was ill she had travelled hundreds of miles to nurse him; she had not hesitated a moment, and she might have caught the fever.  She wouldn’t have done that if she did not love him....  She was always thinking how she could help him, she would do anything for him.  But he was such a strange man.  There were times when there was no one kinder, gentler, more affectionate, but at other times he turned round and snapped like a mad dog.  The desire to be rude took him at times like a disease; this was his most obvious fault.  But his worst fault, at least in her eyes, was his love of parade; his determination to appear to the world in the aspect which he thought was his by birth and position.  Notwithstanding a seeming absence of affection and candour, he was always acting a part.  True that he played the part very well; and his snobbery was never vulgar.

Thinking of him profoundly, looking into his nature with the clear sight of six years of life with him, she decided that the essential fault was an inability to forego the temptation of the moment.  For him the temptation of the moment was the greatest of all.  He was the essential child, and had carried all the child’s passionate egoism into his middle age.  One gave way because everything seemed to mean so much more to him that it could to oneself.  He could not be deprived of his toy; his toy came before everything.  But why did he make himself offensive to many people by speaking against Christianity?  It was so illogical to love art as he did and to hate religion....  He had listened much more indulgently to Ulick than she had expected, and seemed to perceive the picturesqueness of the gods, Angus and Lir.  It was Christianity that irritated and changed him to the cynic he was not, and forced him into arguments which she hated:  “that when you went to the root of things, no one ever acted except from a selfish motive” and his aphorism, “I don’t believe in temptations that one doesn’t yield to.”  Her thoughts went back over years, to the very day he had said the words to her for the first time....  It was true in a way, but it was not the whole truth.  But to him it was the whole truth, that was the unfortunate part of it, and his life was a complete exemplification of this theory, and the result was one of the unhappiest