He looked at her across the room.  The light was beginning to fade, but still the awnings were drawn down beyond the windows, darkening the large bare room.  He saw her as a study in gray and white, with colorless, unshining hair, a body so thin and flexible that it was difficult to believe it contained nerves like a network of steel and muscles capable of prolonged endurance, a face that was haggard in its white beauty, eyes that looked enormous and fixed in the twilight.  The whole aspect of her was melancholy and determined, beautiful and yet almost tragic.  He felt upon him the listless yet imperative grasp which he had first known in Mrs. Chetwinde’s drawing-room, the grasp which resembled Stamboul’s.

“I suppose I shall go to Buyukderer,” he said slowly.  “But I don’t know why you wish it.”

“I have always liked you.”

“Yes, I think you have.”

“I don’t care to see a man such as you are destroyed by a good woman.”

He got up.

“No one is destroying me,” he said, with a dull and hopeless defiance.

“Dion, don’t misunderstand me.  It wouldn’t be strange if you thought I bore your wife a grudge because she didn’t care about knowing me.  But, honestly, I am indifferent to a great many things that most women fuss about.  I quite understood her reluctance.  Directly I saw her I knew that she had ideals, and that she expected all those who were intimately in her life to live up to them.  Instead of accepting the world as it has been created, such women must go one better than the Creator (if there is one), and invent an imaginary world.  Now I shouldn’t be at home in an imaginary world.  I’m not good enough for that, and don’t want to be.  Your wife is very good, but she lives for herself, for her own virtues and the peace and happiness she gets out of them.”

“She lived for Robin,” he interrupted.

“Robin was a part of herself,” Mrs. Clarke said dryly.  “Women like that don’t know how to love as lovers, because they care for the virtues in men rather than for the men themselves.  They are robed in ideals, and they are in mortal fear of a speck of dust falling on the robe.  The dust of my scandal was upon me, so your wife avoided me.  That I was innocent didn’t matter.  I had been mixed up with something ugly.  Your chivalry was instinctively on the side of justice.  Her virtue inclined to the other side.  Her virtue is destructive.”

He was silent.

“Now it has driven you out like a scapegoat into the wilderness!”

“No, no!” he muttered, without conviction.

“But don’t let it destroy you.  I would rather deliberately destroy myself than let any one destroy me.  In the one case there’s strength of a kind, in the other there’s no strength at all.  I speak very plainly, but I’m not a woman full of ideals.  I accept the world just as it is, men just as they are.  If a speck of dust alights on me, I don’t think myself hopelessly befouled; and if some one I loved made a slip, I should only think that it is human to err and that it’s humanity I love.”