the
corroding plebeian scorn for a suspected superiority.

He quarrelled with her, and she sat silent, knowing that her silence,
her passivity, was an affront the more, but helpless, having no word to
say. What could she say?--I do love you: I am wretched: utterly wretched
and utterly destroyed.--That was all there was to say. So she sat, dully
listening, as if drugged. And she only winced when he so far forgot
himself as to cry out that it was her silly pride of blood, the
aristocratic illusion, that had infected her; she belonged to the caste
that could not think and that picked up the artist and thinker to amuse
and fill its vacancy.--"We may be lovers, or we may be performing
poodles, but we are never equals," he had cried. It was for him Amabel
had winced, knowing, without raising her eyes to see it, how his face
would burn with humiliation for having so betrayed his consciousness of
difference. Nothing that he could say could hurt her for herself.

But there was worse to bear: after the violence of his anger came the
violence of his love. She had borne at first, dully, like the slave she
felt herself; for she had sold herself to him, given herself over bound
hand and foot. But now it became intolerable. She could not
protest,--what was there to protest against, or to appeal to?--but she
could fly. The thought of flight rose in her after the torpor of despair
and, with its sense of wings, it felt almost like a joy. She could fly
back, back, to be scourged and purified, and then--oh far away she saw
it now--was something beyond despair; life once more; life hidden,
crippled, but life. A prayer rose like a sob with the thought.

So one night in London her brother Bertram, coming back late to his
rooms, found her sitting there.

Bertram was hard, but not unkind. The sight of her white, fixed face
touched him. He did not upbraid her, though for the past week he had
rehearsed the bitterest of upbraidings. He even spoke soothingly to her
when, speechless, she broke into wild sobs. "There, Amabel, there.--Yes,
it's a frightful mess you've made of things.--When I think of
mother!--Well, I'll say nothing now. You have come back; that is
something. You _have_ left him, Amabel?"

She nodded, her face hidden.

"The brute, the scoundrel," said Bertram, at which she moaned a
negation.--"You don't still care about him?--Well, I won't question you
now.--Perhaps it's not so desperate. Hugh has been very good about it;
he's