I become beyond all example loathsome. The most deplorable
moment of my very inglorious career will be precisely that in which I
cease to look at myself with dispassionate contempt."

Helen knelt down, resting her beautiful arms upon the dark hand-rail of
the balcony, letting her wrists droop over it into the outer dimness.
The bland light from the open window dwelt on her kneeling figure and
bowed head. But it was as well, perhaps, that the night dropped a veil
upon her face.

"And yet so it is," she said. "You may repudiate the idea, but the fact
remains. I do not say it would affect all women alike--affect those,
for instance, whose conception of love, and of the relation between man
and woman, is dependent upon the slightly improper and very tedious
marriage service as authorised by the English Church. Let the
conventional be conventional still! So much the better if you don't
appeal to them--meagre, timid, inadequate, respectable--a generation of
fashion-plates with a sixpenny book of etiquette, moral and social,
stuck inside them to serve for a soul."

Helen's voice broke in a little spasm of laughter, and her hands began,
unconsciously, to open and close, open and close, weaving in soft,
outer darkness.

"We may leave them out of the argument.--But there remain the elect,
Richard, among whom I dare count myself. And over them, never doubt it,
just that which you hate and which appears at first sight to separate
you so cruelly from other men, gives you a strange empire. You
stimulate, you arrest, you satisfy one's imagination, as does the
spectacle of some great drama. You are at once enslaved and emancipated
by this thing--to you hateful, to me adorable--beyond all measure of
bondage or freedom inflicted upon, or enjoyed by, other men. And in
this, just this, lies magnificent compensation if you would but see it.
I have always known that--known that if you would put aside your
arrogance and pride, and yield yourself a little, it was possible to
love you, and give you such joy in loving as one could give to no-one
else on earth."

Her voice sweetened yet more. She leaned forward, pressing her bosom
against the rough ironwork of the balcony.

"I knew that, from the first hour we met, in the variegated, autumn
sunshine, upon the greensward, before the white summer-house
overlooking that noble, English, woodland view. I saw you, and so doing
I saw mysteries of joy in myself unimagined by me before. It went ve