All this later past came back to him as a time grotesquely misspent.

Such at least were his first reflexions; after a while he found himself more divided and only, as the end of it, more troubled.

He imagined, recalled, reconstituted, figured out for himself the truth she had refused to give him; the effect of which was to make her seem to him only more saturated with her fate.

He felt her spirit, through the whole strangeness, finer than his own to the very degree in which she might have been, in which she certainly had been, more wronged.

A women, when wronged, was always more wronged than a man, and there were conditions when the least she could have got off with was more than the most he could have to bear.