‘She could have seen me,’ Victor threw out an irritable suggestion.  The idea of the recent propinquity set hatred in motion.

’Scarcely likely.  I’m told she sits looking on her lap, under the beetling shade, until she hears an order for tinctures or powders, or a mixture that strikes her fancy.  It’s possible to do more suicidal things than sit the afternoons in a chemist’s shop and see poor creatures get their different passports to Orcus.’

Victor stepped mutely beneath the windows of the bellied glass-urns of chemical wash.  The woman might be inside there now!  She might have seen his figure in the shop-mirror!  And she there!  The wonder of it all seemed to be, that his private history was not walking the streets.  The thinness of the partition concealing it, hardly guaranteed a day’s immunity:  because this woman would live in London, in order to have her choice of a central chemist’s shop, where she could feed a ghastly imagination on the various recipes . . . and while it would have been so much healthier for her to be living in a recess of the country!

He muttered:  ‘Diseases—­drugs!’

Those were the corresponding two strokes of the pendulum which kept the woman going.

‘And deadly spite.’  That was the emanation of the monotonous horrible conflict, for which, and by which, the woman lived.

In the neighbourhood of the shop, he could not but think of her through the feelings of a man scorched by a furnace.

A little further on, he said:  ‘Poor soul!’ He confessed to himself, that latterly he had, he knew not why, been impatient with her, rancorous in thought, as never before.  He had hitherto aimed at a picturesque tolerance of her vindictiveness; under suffering, both at Craye and Creckholt; and he had been really forgiving.  He accused her of dragging him down to humanity’s lowest.

But if she did that, it argued the possession of a power of a sort.

Her station in the chemist’s shop he passed almost daily, appeared to him as a sudden and a terrific rush to the front; though it was only a short drive from the house in Regent’s Park; but having shaken-off that house, he had pushed it back into mists, obliterated it.  The woman certainly had a power.

He shot away to the power he knew of in himself; his capacity for winning men in bodies, the host of them, when it came to an effort of his energies:  men and, individually, women.  Individually, the women were to be counted on as well; warm supporters.

It was the admission of a doubt that he might expect to enroll them collectively.  Eyeing the men, he felt his command of them.  Glancing at congregated women, he had a chill.  The Wives and Spinsters in ghostly judicial assembly:  that is, the phantom of the offended collective woman:  that is, the regnant Queen Idea issuing from our concourse of civilized life to govern Society, and pronounce on the orderly, the tolerable, the legal, and banish the rebellious:  these maintained an aspect of the stand against him.