led shading; Wyndham's cynicism was no mere
literary affectation, it was engrained in his very nature. He had gone
through many phases of disillusionment (including disgust at his own
success) before that brief crisis of feeling which ended in his
engagement to Miss Fraser. Then, for the first time in his life, a
woman's nature had been given to him to know. It was a glorious
opportunity for the born analyst; and for the first time in his life he
let an opportunity go. He loved Alison Fraser, and he found that love
made understanding impossible. He never wanted to understand her; the
relentless passion for analysis was absorbed in a comprehensive
enthusiasm which embraced the whole of Alison and took no count of the
parts. To have pulled her to pieces, even with a view to reconstruction,
would have been a profanation of her and of his love. For a whole year
the student of the earthly and the visible lived on the substance of
things unseen--on faith in the goodness of Alison Fraser. By a peculiar
irony it was her very goodness--for she was a good woman--which made her
give up Wyndham. As Miss Gladys Armstrong had guessed (or as she would
have put it, diagnosed), a detail of Wyndham's past life had come to
Miss Fraser's knowledge, as these details always come, through a
well-meaning friend. It was one which made it difficult for her to
reconcile her marriage with Wyndham to her conscience. And because she
loved him, because the thought of him, so hard to other women, so tender
to herself, fascinated her reason and paralysed her will--flattering the
egoism inherent even in the very good--because she was weak and he was
irresistibly strong, she cut herself from him deliberately, open-eyed,
and with one stroke. She had just sufficient strength for the sudden
breaking off of their engagement, none for explanation, and none, alas!
to save her from regretting her act of supererogatory virtue.

Wyndham gave no sign of suffering. He simply sank back into himself, and
became the man he had been before, plus his experience of feeling, and
minus the ingenuousness of his self-knowledge. He took instead to
self-mystification, trying to persuade himself that because he could not
have Alison, Alison was not worth having. After that, it was but a step
to palming off on his reason the monstrous syllogism that because Alison
was unworthy, and Alison was a woman, therefore all women were unworthy.
Except for purely literary purposes, he had