ses in a character which she would have liked to feel completely
alien to her. But what indeed was the girl really like? She seemed to
have no scruples and a thousand delicacies. She had given herself to
Darrow, and concealed the episode from Owen Leath, with no more apparent
sense of debasement than the vulgarest of adventuresses; yet she had
instantly obeyed the voice of her heart when it bade her part from the
one and serve the other.

Anna tried to picture what the girl's life must have been: what
experiences, what initiations, had formed her. But her own training had
been too different: there were veils she could not lift. She looked back
at her married life, and its colourless uniformity took on an air of
high restraint and order. Was it because she had been so incurious that
it had worn that look to her? It struck her with amazement that she had
never given a thought to her husband's past, or wondered what he did and
where he went when he was away from her. If she had been asked what she
supposed he thought about when they were apart, she would instantly have
answered: his snuff-boxes. It had never occurred to her that he might
have passions, interests, preoccupations of which she was absolutely
ignorant. Yet he went up to Paris rather regularly: ostensibly to attend
sales and exhibitions, or to confer with dealers and collectors. She
tried to picture him, straight, trim, beautifully brushed and varnished,
walking furtively down a quiet street, and looking about him before he
slipped into a doorway. She understood now that she had been cold to
him: what more likely than that he had sought compensations? All men
were like that, she supposed--no doubt her simplicity had amused him.

In the act of transposing Fraser Leath into a Don Juan she was pulled up
by the ironic perception that she was simply trying to justify Darrow.
She wanted to think that all men were "like that" because Darrow
was "like that": she wanted to justify her acceptance of the fact by
persuading herself that only through such concessions could women like
herself hope to keep what they could not give up. And suddenly she was
filled with anger at her blindness, and then at her disastrous attempt
to see. Why had she forced the truth out of Darrow? If only she had held
her tongue nothing need ever have been known. Sophy Viner would have
broken her engagement, Owen would have been sent around the world, and
her own dream would have been unshattered.