evil knows?

For there was a great deal of imbecility about the closing scenes of the
Ashburnham tragedy. Neither of those two women knew what they wanted. It
was only Edward who took a perfectly clear line, and he was drunk most
of the time. But, drunk or sober, he stuck to what was demanded by
convention and by the traditions of his house. Nancy Rufford had to be
exported to India, and Nancy Rufford hadn't to hear a word of love from
him. She was exported to India and she never heard a word from Edward
Ashburnham.

It was the conventional line; it was in tune with the tradition of
Edward's house. I daresay it worked out for the greatest good of the
body politic. Conventions and traditions, I suppose, work blindly but
surely for the preservation of the normal type; for the extinction of
proud, resolute and unusual individuals.

Edward was the normal man, but there was too much of the sentimentalist
about him; and society does not need too many sentimentalists. Nancy was
a splendid creature, but she had about her a touch of madness. Society
does not need individuals with touches of madness about them. So Edward
and Nancy found themselves steamrolled out and Leonora survives, the
perfectly normal type, married to a man who is rather like a rabbit.
For Rodney Bayham is rather like a rabbit, and I hear that Leonora is
expected to have a baby in three months' time.

So those splendid and tumultuous creatures with their magnetism and
their passions--those two that I really loved--have gone from this
earth. It is no doubt best for them. What would Nancy have made of
Edward if she had succeeded in living with him; what would Edward have
made of her? For there was about Nancy a touch of cruelty--a touch of
definite actual cruelty that made her desire to see people suffer. Yes,
she desired to see Edward suffer. And, by God, she gave him hell.

She gave him an unimaginable hell. Those two women pursued that poor
devil and flayed the skin off him as if they had done it with whips. I
tell you his mind bled almost visibly. I seem to see him stand, naked to
the waist, his forearms shielding his eyes, and flesh hanging from him
in rags. I tell you that is no exaggeration of what I feel. It was as
if Leonora and Nancy banded themselves together to do execution, for the
sake of humanity, upon the body of a man who was at their disposal. They
were like a couple of Sioux who had got hold of an Apache and had him
well tied to a stake.