And still there is no change in what men feel, though in what they do the modern may be judicious.

You know the many paintings of man transformed to rageing beast by the curse:  and this, the fieriest trial of our egoism, worked in the Egoist to produce division of himself from himself, a concentration of his thoughts upon another object, still himself, but in another breast, which had to be looked at and into for the discovery of him.  By the gaping jaw-chasm of his greed we may gather comprehension of his insatiate force of jealousy.  Let her go?  Not though he were to become a mark of public scorn in strangling her with the yoke!  His concentration was marvellous.  Unused to the exercise of imaginative powers, he nevertheless conjured her before him visually till his eyeballs ached.  He saw none but Clara, hated none, loved none, save the intolerable woman.  What logic was in him deduced her to be individual and most distinctive from the circumstance that only she had ever wrought these pangs.  She had made him ready for them, as we know.  An idea of De Craye being no stranger to her when he arrived at the Hall, dashed him at De Craye for a second:  it might be or might not be that they had a secret;—­Clara was the spell.  So prodigiously did he love and hate, that he had no permanent sense except for her.  The soul of him writhed under her eyes at one moment, and the next it closed on her without mercy.  She was his possession escaping; his own gliding away to the Third.

There would be pangs for him too, that Third!  Standing at the altar to see her fast-bound, soul and body, to another, would be good roasting fire.

It would be good roasting fire for her too, should she be averse.  To conceive her aversion was to burn her and devour her.  She would then be his!—­what say you?  Burned and devoured!  Rivals would vanish then.  Her reluctance to espouse the man she was plighted to would cease to be uttered, cease to be felt.

At last he believed in her reluctance.  All that had been wanted to bring him to the belief was the scene on the common; such a mere spark, or an imagined spark!  But the presence of the Third was necessary; otherwise he would have had to suppose himself personally distasteful.

Women have us back to the conditions of primitive man, or they shoot us higher than the topmost star.  But it is as we please.  Let them tell us what we are to them:  for us, they are our back and front of life:  the poet’s Lesbia, the poet’s Beatrice; ours is the choice.  And were it proved that some of the bright things are in the pay of Darkness, with the stamp of his coin on their palms, and that some are the very angels we hear sung of, not the less might we say that they find us out; they have us by our leanings.  They are to us what we hold of best or worst within.  By their state is our civilization judged:  and if it is hugely animal still, that is because primitive men abound and will