After Jimmy had left Turkey to go back to Eton, and the summer had died, Mrs. Clarke had fulfilled her promise to Dion.  She had settled at Pera for the winter, and she had arranged his life for him.  From the moment of Jimmy’s departure Dion had given himself entirely to her.  He had even given himself with a sort of desperation.  She had been aware of his fierce concentration, and she had tasted it with a keenness of pleasure, she had savored it deliberately and fully in the way of an epicure.  The force of his resolution towards evil—­it was just that—­had acted upon her abominably sensitive temperament as a strong tonic.  That period had been the time when, to her, the game was worth the candle, was worth a whole blaze of candles.

Already, then, Dion had begun to show the new difficult man whom she, working hand in hand with sorrow, had helped to create within him; but she had at first enjoyed his crudities of temper, his occasional outbursts of brutality, his almost fierce roughness and the hardness which alternated with his moments of passion.

She had understood that he was flinging away with furious hands all the baggage of virtue he had clung to in the past, that he was readjusting his life, was reversing all the habits which had been familiar and natural to him in the existence with Rosamund.  So much the better, she had thought.  The fact that he was doing this proved to her her power over him.  She had smiled, in her unsmiling way, upon his efforts to do what she had told him to do, to cut away the cancer that was in him and to cut away all that was round it.  Away with the old moralities, the old hatred of lies and deceptions, the old love of sanity and purity of life.

But away, too, with the old reverence for, and worship of, the woman possessed.

Dion had taken to heart a maxim once uttered to him by Mrs. Clarke in the garden at Buyukderer.  Mention had been made of the very foolish and undignified conduct of a certain woman in Pera society who had been badly treated by a young diplomat.  In discussing the matter Dion had chanced to say: 

“But if she does such things how can any man respect her?”

Mrs. Clarke’s reply, spoken with withering sarcasm, had been: 

“Women don’t want to be respected by men.”

Dion had not forgotten that saying.  It had sunk deep into his heart.  He had come to believe it.  Even when he thought of Rosamund still he believed it.  He had respected her, and had shown his respect in the most chivalrous way at his command, and she had never really loved him.  Evidently women were not what he had thought they were.  Mrs. Clarke knew what they were and a thousand things that he did not know.  He grasped at her cynicism, and he often applied it, translated through his personality, to herself.  He even went farther in cynicism than she had ever gone, behaving like a convert to a religion which had the charm of novelty.  He praised her for her capacities as a liar, a hypocrite, a subtle trickster, a thrower of dust in the eyes of her world.  One of his favorite names for her was “dust-thrower.”  Sometimes he abused her.  She believed that at moments he detested her.  But he clung to her and he did not mean to give her up.  And she knew that.