ot only _niaiserie_, but comes very near to
moral wrong. In this crowded world a man has no business to walk about
with his eyes always on the stars. His stumbles may have too many
consequences. A harsh but a salutary truth! If Elsmere needed it, it was
bitterly taught him during a terrible half-hour. When the half-coherent
enigmatical sentences, to which he listened at first with a perplexed
surprise, began gradually to define themselves; when he found a woman
roused and tragically beautiful between him and escape; when no
determination on his part not to understand; when nothing he could say
availed to protect her from herself; when they were at last face to face
with a confession and an appeal which were a disgrace to both--then at
last Elsmere paid 'in one minute glad life's arrears,'--the natural
penalty of an optimism, a boundless faith in human nature, with which
life, as we know it, is inconsistent.

How he met the softness, the grace, the seduction of a woman who was an
expert in all the arts of fascination he never knew. In memory
afterwards it was all a ghastly mirage to him. The low voice, the
splendid dress, the scented room came back to him, and a confused memory
of his own futile struggle to ward off what she was bent on
saying--little else. He had been maladroit, he thought, had lost his
presence of mind. Any man of the world of his acquaintance, he believed,
trampling on himself, would have done better.

But when the softness and the grace were all lost in smart and
humiliation, when the Madame de Netteville of ordinary life disappeared,
and something took her place which was like a coarse and malignant
underself suddenly brought into the light of day--from that point
onwards, in after days, he remembered it all.

'... I know,' cried Eugenie de Netteville at last, standing at bay
before him, her hands locked before her, her white lips quivering, when
her cup of shame was full, and her one impulse left was to strike the
man who had humiliated her--'I know that you and your puritanical wife
are miserable--_miserable_. What is the use of denying facts that all
the world can see, that you have taken pains,' and she laid a fierce
deliberate emphasis on each word, 'all the world shall see? There--let
your wife's ignorance and bigotry, and your own obvious relation to her,
be my excuse, if I wanted any; but,' and she shrugged her white
shoulders passionately, 'I want _none_! I am not responsible to your
pet