er? Lied, so that she might get him for
herself? For her fancy, for no more than a low animal would feel. He
could see it now. He could see what she was. A woman who could fancy
Mercier must have been a low animal all through and all the time.

How he had ever cared for her he couldn't think. There must have been
some beastliness in him. Men _were_ beasts sometimes. But he was worse.
He was a fool to have believed her lie. Even her beastliness sank out of
sight beside that treachery.

Well--she'd been frank enough about it now. She must have had a face, to
own that she'd lied to him and trapped him! After that, what did it
matter if she _had_ left him? "I dare say you know who I've gone with."
What did it matter who she'd gone with? Good God! What did it matter
what she'd done?

He could smile at her fear and at the cause of it. Mercier must have
terrified her with his funk. The postscript said as much. "You can do
anything you like to me, so long as you don't hurt Leonard." He smiled
again at that. What did she imagine he'd like to do to her? As for
Mercier, what should he want to hurt the beast for? He wouldn't touch
him--now--with the end of a barge-pole.

Oh, well, yes, he supposed he'd have to leather him if he came across
him. But he wouldn't have any pleasure in it--now. Last year he would
have leathered him with joy; his feet had fairly ached to get at him, to
kick the swine out of the house before he did any harm in it. Now it was
as if he loathed him too much in his flabbiness to care for the contact
that personal violence involved.

Yet, through all the miserable workings of his mind the thought of
Mercier's flabbiness was sweet to him. It gave him a curious consolation
and support. True, it had been the chief agent in the process of
deception; it had blinded him to Mercier's dangerous quality; it had
given him a sense of false security; he could see, now, the fool he'd
been to imagine that it would act as any deterrent to a woman so
foredoomed as Violet. Thus it had in a measure brought about the whole
catastrophe. At the same time it had saved him from the peculiar
personal mortification such catastrophes entail. In comparison with
Mercier he sustained no injury to his pride and vanity of sex. And
Mercier's flabbiness did more for him than that. It took the sharpest
sting from Violet's infidelity. It removed it to the region of insane
perversities. It removed Violet herself from her place in memory, th