ursuit, to a depth where none could follow, where the soul
enjoyed the safety of utter isolation.

Hermione did not wish to pursue this anchorite. She did not wish to draw
near to Vere that evening. To do so would have been impossible to her,
even had Vere been willing to come to her. Since the brutal outburst
of the Marchesino, she, too, had felt the desire, the necessity, of a
desert place, where she could sit alone and realize the bareness of her
world.

In that outburst of passion the Marchesino had gathered together and
hurled at her beliefs that had surely been her own, but that she had
striven to avoid, that she had beaten back as spectres and unreal, that
she had even denied, tricking, or trying to trick, her terrible sense of
truth. His brutality had made the delicacy in her crouch and sicken.
It had been almost intolerable to her, to see her friend, Emile, thus
driven out into the open, like one naked, to be laughed at, condemned,
held up, that the wild folly, the almost insane absurdity of his secret
self might be seen and understood even by the blind, the determined in
stupidity.

She had always had a great reverence for her friend, which had been
mingled with her love for him, giving it its character. Was this
reverence to be torn utterly away? Had it already been cast to the
winds?

Poor Emile!

In the first moments after the departure of the Marchesino she pitied
Emile intensely with all her heart of woman. If this thing were true,
how he must have suffered, how he must still be suffering--not only in
his heart, but in his mind! His sense of pride, his self-respect, his
passion for complete independence, his meticulous consciousness of the
fitness of things, of what could be and what was impossible--all must by
lying in the dust. She could almost have wept for him then.

But another feeling succeeded this sense of pity, a sensation of
outrage that grew within her and became almost ungovernable. She had her
independence too, her pride, her self-respect. And now she saw them in
dust that Emile had surely heaped about them. A storm of almost
hard anger shook her. She tasted an acrid bitterness that seemed to
impregnate her, to turn the mainspring of her life to gall. She heard
the violent voice of the young Neapolitan saying: "He is master, he is
master, he has always been master here!" And she tried to look back
over her life, and to see how things had been. And, shaken still by
this storm of anger,