She had said to herself, perhaps with a fury of self-contempt "In a few years I shall be too old for anybody.
Meantime I shall have him--and I shall hold him by throwing to him the money of that ordinary, silly, little girl of no account." Well, it was a desperate expedient--but she thought it worth while.

And besides there is hardly a woman in the world, no matter how hard, depraved or frantic, in whom something of the maternal instinct does not survive, unconsumed like a salamander, in the fires of the most abandoned passion.

Yes there might have been that sentiment for him too.

There _was_ no doubt.

So I say again: No wonder! No wonder that she raged at everything--and perhaps even at him, with contradictory reproaches: for regretting the girl, a little fool who would never in her life be worth anybody's attention, and for taking the disaster itself with a cynical levity in which she perceived a flavour of revolt.
And so the altercation in the night went on, over the irremediable.