husband I'm afraid of, it's Jimmy."

If Dion had been by nature a suspicious man, or if he had had a wider
experience with women, Mrs. Clarke's remarkable ingenuity in hypocrisy
would almost certainly have suggested to him that she was no novice in
the life of deception. Her appearance of frankness, even of bluntness,
was admirable. To every one she presented herself as a woman of strong
will and unconventional temperament who took her own way openly, having
nothing to conceal, and therefore nothing to fear. She made a feature
of her friendship with the tragic Englishman; she even dwelt upon it
and paraded it for the pretense of blunt and Platonic friendship was the
cloud with which she concealed the fire of their illicit relation. The
trip on the "Leyla" to Brusa had tortured Dion. Since the episode in
the pavilion a more refined torment had been his. Mrs. Clarke had not
allowed him to escape from the social ties which were so hateful to him.
She had made him understand that he must go among her acquaintances
now and then, that he must take a certain part in the summer life
of Therapia and Buyukderer, that the trip to Brusa had been only a
beginning. More than once he had tried to break away, but he had not
succeeded in his effort. Her will had been too strong for his, not
merely because she did not fear at moments to be fierce and determined,
but because behind her fierceness and determination was an unuttered
plea which his not dead chivalry heard; "For you I have become what I
was falsely accused of being in London." He remembered the wonderful
fight she had made then; often her look and manner, when they were alone
together, implied, "I couldn't make such a fight now." She never said
that, but she made him float in an atmosphere of that suggestion.

He believed that she loved him. Sometimes he compared her love with the
affection which Rosamund had given him, and then it seemed to his not
very experienced heart that perhaps intense love can only show itself
by something akin to degradation, by enticements which a genuinely
pure nature could never descend to, by perversities which the grand
simplicity and wholesomeness of goodness would certainly abhor. Then a
distortion of love presented itself to his tragic investigation as
the only love that was real, and good and evil lost for him their true
significance. He had said to himself, "Let the spirit die that the body
may live." He had wished, he still wished, to pul