How well he had always remembered her words to him as they stood face to face in the chilly whiteness of an English bridal chamber in midwinter!  “It’s no use, dear, I don’t want any of this sort of thing.  It seems to me coarse and stupid, and I don’t want the bother of a dozen babies.  I married because I wanted the position of a married woman, and a nice presentable man to go about with in society.  Besides, things were not satisfactory at home, and I wanted a man to keep me, and all that.  But I don’t see why you should get into such a state of mind about it.  I will keep house, and be perfectly good and amiable, and we can go about together, of course; only I want to keep my own room.”

And how well he remembered her as she stood there, shattering his life with her cold, light words—­a tall, slim girl, in her white dinner dress!  She had been very fair then, with a quantity of soft flaxen hair, which shortly after she had taken to dyeing—­a thing he had always hated.  She had a small, heart-shaped face, so light in colour as to suggest anaemia, with a high, thin nose, of which the nostrils were excessively pinched together, a short upper lip, and a thick, quite colourless mouth, small when closed, when she laughed opening wide far back to her throat, showing, as it seemed, an infinite quantity of long, narrow, white, wolf-like teeth.

How hideous she had suddenly appeared to him in those moments, seen through the dark waves of passion she rolled back upon him!  In the hot, rosy glow she had deliberately conjured up before his eyes of love and love returned he had thought her beautiful.  Now, as she took the veil from her mean, base mind, it fell also from her beauty, and he saw her ugly, as she really was, body and soul.  Stunned and amazed, loathing his own folly, his own blindness, condemning these more than he did her cruelty, Hamilton had listened in silence while she revealed herself.  When the first shock was over, he had set himself to talk and reason with her.  Naturally intensely kind and sympathetic, it was easy for him to see another’s view, to put himself in another’s place.  He blamed himself at once, more than her, for the position he now found himself in.  And patiently he tried to understand it, to find the clue, if possible, to remedy it.  He reasoned long and gently with her, but she, knowing well the generous nature she had to deal with, yielded not an inch.  Hamilton was not the man to use force or violence.  The passions of the body, divested of their soul, were nothing to him.  On that night she struck down within him all desire for or interest in her.  He left her at last, and withdrew to another room, where he sat through the remaining hours of the night, looking into the face of his future.

Shortly after, he had left for India, the corpse of dead passion within his breast.  He made a confident of no one, told no one of his secret burden, remitted half his pay regularly to his wife with that obedience to custom and duty as the world sees it, with that quiet dutifulness that is so astounding to the onlooker, but characteristic of so many Englishmen, and threw himself into his work, avoiding women and personal relations with them.