been building up
for years. Instead of appreciating her heroism he had forced her to
become a coward in the eyes of the world. She had hoped to be his equal,
and he had treated her as a school-girl. It had all been a mistake. She
was not and could not be the woman she had hoped. He was not and never
had been the man she had imagined. They had nothing in common.

But it was not easy to give Bennett up, to let him pass out of her life.
She wanted to love him yet. With all her heart and strength, in spite of
everything--woman that she was, she had come to that--in spite of
everything she wanted to love him. Though he had broken her will,
thwarted her ambitions, ignored her cherished hopes, misunderstood and
mistaken her, yet, if she could, Lloyd would yet have loved him, loved
him even for the very fact that he had been stronger than she.

Again and again she tried to awaken this dead affection, to call back
this vanished love. She tried to remember the Bennett she had known; she
told herself that he loved her; that he had said that the great things
he had done had been done only with an eye to her approval; that she had
been his inspiration no less than he had been hers; that he had fought
his way back, not only to life, but to her. She thought of all he had
suffered, of the hardships and privations beyond her imagination to
conceive, that he had undergone. She tried to recall the infinite joy of
that night when the news of his safe return had come to her; she thought
of him at his very best--how he had always seemed to her the type of the
perfect man, masterful, aggressive, accomplishing great projects with an
energy and determination almost superhuman, one of the world's great
men, whose name the world still shouted. She called to mind how the very
ruggedness of his face; with its massive lines and harsh angles, had
attracted her; how she had been proud of his giant's strength, the vast
span of his shoulders, the bull-like depth of his chest, the sense of
enormous physical power suggested by his every movement.

But it was all of no effect. That Bennett was worse than dead to her.
The Bennett that now came to her mind and imagination was the brutal,
perverse man of the breakfast-room at Medford, coarse, insolent,
intractable, stamping out all that was finest in her, breaking and
flinging away the very gifts he had inspired her to offer him. It was
nothing to him that she should stand degraded in the eyes of the world.