brazen lies and published kisses,
of love-letters read amid obscene guffaws, as a positive tonic to
resentment, as a high incentive to her course--this was what put him
so beautifully in the right It was what might signify in a woman all
through, he said to himself, the mere imagination of such machinery.
Truly what a devilish conception and what an appalling nature!

But there was no doubt, luckily, either, that he _could_ plant his feet
the firmer for his now intensified sense of these things. He was to
live, it appeared, abominably worried, he was to live consciously
rueful, he was to live perhaps even what a scoffing world would call
abjectly exposed; but at least he was to live saved. In spite of his
clutch of which steadying truth, however, and in spite of his declaring
to her, with many other angry protests and pleas, that the line of
conduct she announced was worthy of a vindictive barmaid, a lurking fear
in him, too deep to counsel mere defiance, made him appear to keep open
a little, till he could somehow turn round again, the door of possible
composition. He had scoffed at her claim, at her threat, at her thinking
she could hustle and bully him--"Such a way, my eye, to call back
to life a dead love!"--yet his instinct was ever, prudentially but
helplessly, for gaining time, even if time only more wofully to quake,
and he gained it now by not absolutely giving for his ultimatum that he
wouldn't think of coming round. He didn't in the smallest degree mean to
come round, but it was characteristic of him that he could for three
or four days breathe a little easier by having left her under the
impression that he perhaps might. At the same time he couldn't not have
said--what had conduced to bring out, in retort, her own last word, the
word on which they had parted--"Do you mean to say you yourself would
now be _willing_ to marry and live with a man of whom you could feel,
the thing done, that he'd be all the while thinking of you in the light
of a hideous coercion?" "Never you mind about _my_ willingness," Kate
had answered; "you've known what that has been for the last six months.
Leave that to me, my willingness--I'll take care of it all right; and
just see what conclusion you can come to about your own."

He was to remember afterward how he had wondered whether, turned upon
her in silence while her odious lucidity reigned unchecked, his face had
shown her anything like the quantity of hate he felt. Probably not