“What had you. to do with Mallard, Cecily?”

“I had to tell him that my life was a failure, and to thank him for having wished to save me from this fate.”

Her answers were given in a dull monotone; she seemed to be heedless of the impression they made.

“You said that to Mallard?”

“Yes.  It can be nothing to me what you think of it.  I had waited here till I could bear loneliness no longer; I knew I had one true friend, and I went to him.”

“You behaved as no self-respecting woman could!” Elgar exclaimed passionately.

“If so,” she answered, meeting his look, “the shame falls only on myself.”

“That is not true!  You yourself seem to be unconscious of the shame; to me it is horrible suffering.  I thought you incapable of anything of the kind.  I looked up to you as a high-minded woman, and I loved you for your superiority to myself.”

“You loved me?” she asked, with a bitter smile.

“Yes; believe it or not, as you like.  Because I was maddened by sensual passion for a creature whom I never one moment respected, how did that lessen my love for you?  You complain that I kept away from you; I did so because I was still racked by that vile torment, and shrank in reverence from approaching you.  You might have known me well enough to understand this.  Have I not told you a thousand times that in me soul and body have lived separate lives?  Even when I seemed sunk in the lowest depths, I still loved you purely and truly; I loved you all the more because I was conscious of my brutal faults.  Now you have destroyed my ideal; you have degraded yourself in my esteem.  It is nothing to me now, do what you may!  I can never forgive you.  By doing yourself wrong, you have wronged me beyond all words!”

Cecily could not take her eyes from him.  She marvelled at such emotion in him.  But the only way in which it affected her own feeling was to make her question herself anxiously as to whether she had really fallen below her self-respect.  Had she led Mallard to think of her with like disapproval?

Life is so simple to people of the old civilization.  The rules are laid down so broadly and plainly, and the con. science they have created answers so readily when appealed to.  But for these poor instructed persons, what a complex affair has morality become!  Hard enough for men, but for women desperate indeed.  Each must be her own casuist, and without any criterion save what she can establish by her own experience.  The growth of Cecily’s mind had removed her further and further from simplicity of thought; this was in part the cause of that perpetual sense of weariness to which she awoke day after day.  Communion with such a man as Elgar strengthened the natural tendency, until there was scarcely a motive left to which she could yield without discussing it in herself, consciously or unconsciously.  Her safeguard was an innate nobleness of spirit.  But it is not to every woman of brains that this is granted.