ife, was reversing all the habits which had been familiar and
natural to him in the existence with Rosamund. So much the better, she
had thought. The fact that he was doing this proved to her her power
over him. She had smiled, in her unsmiling way, upon his efforts to do
what she had told him to do, to cut away the cancer that was in him and
to cut away all that was round it. Away with the old moralities, the
old hatred of lies and deceptions, the old love of sanity and purity of
life.

But away, too, with the old reverence for, and worship of, the woman
possessed.

Dion had taken to heart a maxim once uttered to him by Mrs. Clarke in
the garden at Buyukderer. Mention had been made of the very foolish
and undignified conduct of a certain woman in Pera society who had been
badly treated by a young diplomat. In discussing the matter Dion had
chanced to say:

"But if she does such things how can any man respect her?"

Mrs. Clarke's reply, spoken with withering sarcasm, had been:

"Women don't want to be _respected_ by men."

Dion had not forgotten that saying. It had sunk deep into his heart.
He had come to believe it. Even when he thought of Rosamund still he
believed it. He had respected her, and had shown his respect in the
most chivalrous way at his command, and she had never really loved him.
Evidently women were not what he had thought they were. Mrs. Clarke knew
what they were and a thousand things that he did not know. He grasped
at her cynicism, and he often applied it, translated through his
personality, to herself. He even went farther in cynicism than she had
ever gone, behaving like a convert to a religion which had the charm
of novelty. He praised her for her capacities as a liar, a hypocrite, a
subtle trickster, a thrower of dust in the eyes of her world. One of his
favorite names for her was "dust-thrower." Sometimes he abused her. She
believed that at moments he detested her. But he clung to her and he did
not mean to give her up. And she knew that.

After that horrible night when Jimmy had waked up she had succeeded in
making Dion believe that he was deeply loved by her. She had really had
an ugly passion for him, and she had contrived easily enough to dress
it up and present it as love. And he clung to that semblance of love,
because it was all that he had, because it was a weapon in his hand, and
because he had made for it a sacrifice. He had sacrificed the truth that
was in him, and he had rec