“Oh, she ’s a fine girl!” Rowland said.

“Have you done anything that will hurt poor Mary?” Mrs. Hudson asked.

“I have only been thinking night and day of another woman!”

Mrs. Hudson dropped helplessly into her seat again.  “Oh dear, dear, had n’t we better go home?”

“Not to get out of her way!” Roderick said.  “She has started on a career of her own, and she does n’t care a straw for me.  My head was filled with her; I could think of nothing else; I would have sacrificed everything to her—­you, Mary, Mallet, my work, my fortune, my future, my honor!  I was in a fine state, eh?  I don’t pretend to be giving you good news; but I ’m telling the simple, literal truth, so that you may know why I have gone to the dogs.  She pretended to care greatly for all this, and to be willing to make any sacrifice in return; she had a magnificent chance, for she was being forced into a mercenary marriage with a man she detested.  She led me to believe that she would give this up, and break short off, and keep herself free and sacred and pure for me.  This was a great honor, and you may believe that I valued it.  It turned my head, and I lived only to see my happiness come to pass.  She did everything to encourage me to hope it would; everything that her infernal coquetry and falsity could suggest.”

“Oh, I say, this is too much!” Rowland broke out.

“Do you defend her?” Roderick cried, with a renewal of his passion.  “Do you pretend to say that she gave me no hopes?” He had been speaking with growing bitterness, quite losing sight of his mother’s pain and bewilderment in the passionate joy of publishing his wrongs.  Since he was hurt, he must cry out; since he was in pain, he must scatter his pain abroad.  Of his never thinking of others, save as they spoke and moved from his cue, as it were, this extraordinary insensibility to the injurious effects of his eloquence was a capital example; the more so as the motive of his eloquence was never an appeal for sympathy or compassion, things to which he seemed perfectly indifferent and of which he could make no use.  The great and characteristic point with him was the perfect absoluteness of his own emotions and experience.  He never saw himself as part of a whole; only as the clear-cut, sharp-edged, isolated individual, rejoicing or raging, as the case might be, but needing in any case absolutely to affirm himself.  All this, to Rowland, was ancient history, but his perception of it stirred within him afresh, at the sight of Roderick’s sense of having been betrayed.  That he, under the circumstances, should not in fairness be the first to lodge a complaint of betrayal was a point to which, at his leisure, Rowland was of course capable of rendering impartial justice; but Roderick’s present desperation was so peremptory that it imposed itself on one’s sympathies.  “Do you pretend to say,” he went on, “that she did n’t lead me along to the very edge of