marry,
never put himself in any woman's power again. And in the plenitude of
his self-knowledge he knew exactly how far he could let himself go
without either of these evil results following.

Unfortunately, in these cases the woman is seldom so well equipped for
self-defence as the man. Owing to her invincible ignorance of her own
nature, she must be more or less at a disadvantage. And if this is true
of women in general, it was doubly true of any one so specially prone to
illusion as Audrey Craven, who would have had difficulty in recognising
any part of her true self under its numerous disguises. She was
therefore unaware of the action and reaction which had been going on
within her during the last year. Whatever its precise quality may have
been, her love for Ted Haviland was of a different quality from her
feeling for Langley Wyndham. Under that earlier influence, whatever
intelligence she possessed had been roused from its torpor by the tumult
of her senses; her mind had been opened and made ready for the attack of
a finer intellectual passion, which again in its turn brought her under
the tyranny of the senses. For though her worst enemies could not call
Audrey clever, it was Wyndham's intellectual eminence which had
fascinated her from the first. Herein lay her danger and her excuse. She
was aware--hence her late access of reserve--that she was being carried
away by her feelings; but how, when, and whither, she neither knew nor
apparently cared to know. In the meanwhile, in Wyndham's friendship she
not only triumphed over Vincent's scorn, but she felt secure against his
infatuation. For she imagined the scorn and the infatuation as still
existing together. She knew that he was still in London, presumably
unable to tear himself away from her neighbourhood; and the sense of his
presence, of his power over her, had been so long a habit of her mind
that she could not lose it now. Otherwise she hardly gave him a thought;
and having cut herself off from all communication with Devon Street, she
did not certainly know what had become of him.

She had yet to learn.

Towards the end of February she received a letter from Vincent's mother
which left no doubt on the subject. The news of his downfall had reached
his home at last. Mrs. Hardy knew of her son's attachment to his cousin,
and had always had fixed ideas on that point. On being told that he had
"gone" irretrievably "to the bad," she jumped to a conclusion: it wa