erience concentrated themselves
into that lawless week. She saw that laws were not outside things; that
they were one's very self at its wisest. She saw that if laws were to be
broken it could only be by a self wiser than the self that had made the
law. And the self that had fled with Paul Quentin was only a passionate,
blinded fragment, a heart without a brain, a fragment judged and
rejected by the whole.

To both lovers the week was one of bitter disillusion, though for
Quentin no such despair was possible. For him it was an attempt at joy
and beauty that had failed. This dulled, drugged looking girl was not
the radiant woman he had hoped to find. Vain and sensitive as he was, he
felt, almost immediately, that he had lost his charm for her; that she
had ceased to love him. That was the ugly, the humiliating side of the
truth, the side that so filled Amabel Channice's soul with sickness as
she looked back at it. She had ceased to love him, almost at once.

And it was not guilt only, and fear, that had risen between them and
separated them; there were other, smaller, subtler reasons, little
snakes that hissed in her memory. He was different from her in other
ways.

She hardly saw that one of the ways was that of breeding; but she felt
that he jarred upon her constantly, in their intimacy, their helpless,
dreadful intimacy. In contrast, the thought of her husband had been with
her, burningly. She did not say to herself, for she did not know it, her
experience of life was too narrow to give her the knowledge,--that her
husband was a gentleman and her lover, a man of genius though he were,
was not; but she compared them, incessantly, when Quentin's words and
actions, his instinctive judgments of men and things, made her shrink
and flush. He was so clever, cleverer far than Hugh; but he did not
know, as Sir Hugh would have known, what the slight things were that
would make her shrink. He took little liberties when he should have been
reticent and he was humble when he should have been assured. For he was
often humble; he was, oddly, pathetically--and the pity for him added to
the sickness--afraid of her and then, because he was afraid, he grew
angry with her.

He was clever; but there are some things cleverness cannot reach. What
he failed to feel by instinct, he tried to scorn. It was not the
patrician scorn, stupid yet not ignoble, for something hardly seen,
hardly judged, merely felt as dull and insignificant; it was