Then he slowly pulled off its wings, one by one, because they were so pretty.
He remembered it as if it were yesterday, and the sudden disgust and almost fear with which he suddenly tossed away the little mutilated ugly thing with struggling legs.
The cruelty of it filled him even now with shamed pain.
"It was not I who did it," he said to himself "I did not understand." And a bandage was removed from his eyes, and he looked down, as we look into still water, and he saw that Fay did not understand either.

She had put out her hand to take him.

She had pulled his wings off him.

She had cast him aside.

Perhaps she even felt horror of him now.