If Dion had been by nature a suspicious man, or if he had had a wider experience with women, Mrs. Clarke’s remarkable ingenuity in hypocrisy would almost certainly have suggested to him that she was no novice in the life of deception.  Her appearance of frankness, even of bluntness, was admirable.  To every one she presented herself as a woman of strong will and unconventional temperament who took her own way openly, having nothing to conceal, and therefore nothing to fear.  She made a feature of her friendship with the tragic Englishman; she even dwelt upon it and paraded it for the pretense of blunt and Platonic friendship was the cloud with which she concealed the fire of their illicit relation.  The trip on the “Leyla” to Brusa had tortured Dion.  Since the episode in the pavilion a more refined torment had been his.  Mrs. Clarke had not allowed him to escape from the social ties which were so hateful to him.  She had made him understand that he must go among her acquaintances now and then, that he must take a certain part in the summer life of Therapia and Buyukderer, that the trip to Brusa had been only a beginning.  More than once he had tried to break away, but he had not succeeded in his effort.  Her will had been too strong for his, not merely because she did not fear at moments to be fierce and determined, but because behind her fierceness and determination was an unuttered plea which his not dead chivalry heard; “For you I have become what I was falsely accused of being in London.”  He remembered the wonderful fight she had made then; often her look and manner, when they were alone together, implied, “I couldn’t make such a fight now.”  She never said that, but she made him float in an atmosphere of that suggestion.

He believed that she loved him.  Sometimes he compared her love with the affection which Rosamund had given him, and then it seemed to his not very experienced heart that perhaps intense love can only show itself by something akin to degradation, by enticements which a genuinely pure nature could never descend to, by perversities which the grand simplicity and wholesomeness of goodness would certainly abhor.  Then a distortion of love presented itself to his tragic investigation as the only love that was real, and good and evil lost for him their true significance.  He had said to himself, “Let the spirit die that the body may live.”  He had wished, he still wished, to pull down.  He had a sort of demented desire for ruins and dust.  But he longed for action, on the grand scale.  Small secrecies, trickeries, tiptoeing through the maze—­all these things revolted that part of his nature which was, perhaps, unchangeable.  They seemed to him unmanly.  In his present condition he could quite easily have lain down in the sink of Pera’s iniquity, careless whether any one knew; but it was horribly difficult to him to dine with the Ingletons and Vane at the Villa Hafiz, to say “Good night” to Mrs. Clarke before them, to go away, leaving them in the villa, and then, very late, to sneak back, with a key, to the garden gate, when all the servants were in bed, and to creep up, like a thief, to the pavilion.  Some men would have enjoyed all the small deceptions, would have thought them good fun, would have found that they added a sharp zest to the pursuit of a woman.  Dion loathed them.