But from such a type of love there are terrible reactions.  During these reactions Dion had treated Cynthia Clarke abominably sometimes, showing the hatred which alternated with his ugly love, if love it could properly be called.  He hated her in such moments for the fierce lure she had for the senses, a lure which he felt more and more strongly as he left farther behind him the old life of sane enjoyments and of the wisdom which walks with restraint; he hated her for the perversity which he was increasingly conscious of as he came to know her more intimately; he hated her because he had so much loved the woman who would not make a friend of her; he hated her because he knew that she was drawing him into a path which led into the center of a maze, the maze of hypocrisy.

Hitherto Dion had been essentially honest and truthful, what men call “open and above-board.”  He had walked clear-eyed in the light; he had had nothing dirty to hide; what his relations with others had seemed to be that they had actually been.  But since that first night in the pavilion Cynthia Clarke had taught him very thoroughly the hypocrisy a man owes to the woman with whom he has a secret liaison.

He still believed that till that night she had been what the world calls “a straight woman.”  She did not ape a rigid morality for once betrayed by passion, or pretend to any religious scruples, or show any fears of an eventual punishment held in reserve for all sinners by an implacable Power; she did not, when Dion was brutal to her, ever reproach him with having made of her a wicked or even a light woman.  But she made him feel by innumerable hints and subtleties that for him she had exchanged a safe life for a life that was beset with danger, the smiled-on life of a not too conventional virtue for something very different.  She seemed sometimes uneasy in her love, as if such a love were an error new to her experience.

Jimmy was her chief weapon against Dion’s natural sincerity.  Dion realized that she was passionately attached to her boy, and that she would make almost any sacrifice rather than lose his respect and affection.  Nevertheless, she was ready to take great risks.  The risks she was not prepared to take were the smaller risks.  And in connexion with them her call for hypocrisy was incessant.  If Dion ever tried to resist her demands for small lies and petty deceptions, she would look at him, and say huskily: 

“I have to do these things now because of Jimmy.  No one must ever have the least suspicion of what we are to each other, or some day Jimmy might get to know of it.  It isn’t my husband I’m afraid of, it’s Jimmy.”