Yet what pleasure had there been after all in these meetings!  Again and again she had seen him surrounded there by pretty and fashionable women, with some of whom he was on amazingly easy terms, while with all of them he talked their language, and so far as she could see to a great extent lived their life.  The contradiction of the House of Commons evening returned upon her perpetually.  She thought she saw in many of his new friends a certain malicious triumph in the readiness with which the young demagogue had yielded to their baits.  No doubt they were at least as much duped as he.  Like Hallin, she did not believe, that at bottom he was the man to let himself be held by silken bonds if it should be to his interest to break them.  But, meanwhile, his bearing among these people—­the claims they and their amusement made upon his time and his mind—­seemed to this girl, who watched them, with her dark, astonished eyes, a kind of treachery to his place and his cause.  It was something she had never dreamed of; and it roused her contempt and irritation.

Then as to herself.  He had been all eagerness in his enquiries after her from Mrs. Lane; and he never saw her in the Piccadilly drawing-room that he did not pay her homage, often with a certain extravagance, a kind of appropriation, which Mrs. Lane secretly thought in bad taste, and Marcella sometimes resented.  On the other hand, things jarred between them frequently.  From day to day he varied.  She had dreamt of a great friendship; but instead, it was hardly possible to carry on the thread of their relation from meeting to meeting with simplicity and trust.  On the Terrace he had behaved, or would have behaved, if she had allowed him, as a lover.  When they met again at Mrs. Lane’s he would be sometimes devoted in his old paradoxical, flattering vein; sometimes, she thought, even cool.  Nay, once or twice he was guilty of curious little neglects towards her, generally in the presence of some great lady or other.  On one of these occasions she suddenly felt herself flushing from brow to chin at the thought—­“He does not want any one to suppose for a moment that he wishes to marry me!”

It had taken Wharton some difficult hours to subdue in her the effects of that one moment’s fancy.  Till then it is the simple truth to say that she had never seriously considered the possibility of marrying him.  When it did enter her mind, she saw that it had already entered his—­and that he was full of doubts!  The perception had given to her manner an increasing aloofness and pride which had of late piqued Wharton into efforts from which vanity, and, indeed, something else, could not refrain, if he was to preserve his power.

So she was sitting by the window this afternoon, in a mood which had in it neither simplicity nor joy.  She was conscious of a certain dull and baffled feeling—­a sense of humiliation—­which hurt.  Moreover, the scene of sordid horror she had gone through haunted her imagination perpetually.  She was unstrung, and the world weighed upon her—­the pity, the ugliness, the confusion of it.