ion's misery. It
had wrapped him in a garment that was novel. It had thrown about him
a certain romance. But now she was becoming weary of it. She had had
enough of it and enough of him. That horrible process, which she knew
so well, had repeated itself once more: she had wanted a thing; she had
striven for it; she had obtained it; she had enjoyed it (for she knew
well how to enjoy and never thought that the game was not worth the
candle). And then, by slow, almost imperceptible degrees, her power of
enjoyment had begun to lessen. Day by day it had lost in strength. She
had tried to stimulate it, to deceive herself about its decay, but the
time had come, as it had come to her many times in the past, when she
had been forced to acknowledge to herself that it was no longer living
but a corpse. Dion Leith had played his part in her life. She wished now
to put him outside of her door. She had made sacrifices for him; for
him she had run risks. All that was very well so long as he had had
the power to reward her. But now she was beginning to brood over those
risks, those sacrifices, with resentment, to magnify them in her mind;
she was beginning to be angry as she dwelt upon that which distortedly
she thought of as her unselfishness.

After Jimmy had left Turkey to go back to Eton, and the summer had died,
Mrs. Clarke had fulfilled her promise to Dion. She had settled at Pera
for the winter, and she had arranged his life for him. From the moment
of Jimmy's departure Dion had given himself entirely to her. He had
even given himself with a sort of desperation. She had been aware of his
fierce concentration, and she had tasted it with a keenness of pleasure,
she had savored it deliberately and fully in the way of an epicure. The
force of his resolution towards evil--it was just that--had acted upon
her abominably sensitive temperament as a strong tonic. That period had
been the time when, to her, the game was worth the candle, was worth a
whole blaze of candles.

Already, then, Dion had begun to show the new difficult man whom she,
working hand in hand with sorrow, had helped to create within him;
but she had at first enjoyed his crudities of temper, his occasional
outbursts of brutality, his almost fierce roughness and the hardness
which alternated with his moments of passion.

She had understood that he was flinging away with furious hands all the
baggage of virtue he had clung to in the past, that he was readjusting
his l