He even tried to show her that he was in earnest by assuming for a while an altered attitude towards the ladies, and actually succeeded so far that she appeared to have forgotten that anything had occurred between them, and was just the same in her intercourse with him as before--quietly friendly that is to say, as she had been of recent years.
It never came to any real reconciliation on her side.

She had seen too clearly that his nature was only that of a drifting cloud, glowing for the moment just as it was played upon by popular applause; and he was too profoundly selfish for any real earnest love to find a root in his composition, much less to give promise of a common life-growth.

With his feeling and good-nature he would have treated any wife well, even if she had not made herself so necessary to him as she was; her social talent, she felt, was her great safety--it made him look up to her; and his vain nature required that she should be something to be proud of: but she was forced to acknowledge in her own heart with despair that she had been blinded by her love for him, that his nature was absolutely deficient in constancy and truth, and in every quality which she had once persuaded herself to see in him.

She knew the secret about this man, so brilliant before the eyes of the world--that he was not a man.

He lived and moved before her now like a defaced ideal, to which she was tied--to the end of her life.