man are two. Now, on
the contrary, I found soon enough that I couldn't get one part of my
machinery to work effectively while another wanted feeding: and that in
rejecting what had seemed to me a negation of action I had made all my
action negative.

"The best solution, of course, would have been to fall in love with
another woman; but it was long before I could bring myself to wish that
this might happen to me.... Then, at length, I suddenly and violently
desired it; and as such impulses are seldom without some kind of
imperfect issue I contrived, a year or two later, to work myself up into
the wished-for state.... She was a woman in society, and with all
the awe of that institution that Paulina lacked. Our relation was
consequently one of those unavowed affairs in which triviality is the
only alternative to tragedy. Luckily we had, on both sides, risked only
as much as prudent people stake in a drawingroom game; and when the
match was over I take it that we came out fairly even.

"My gain, at all events, was of an unexpected kind. The adventure
had served only to make me understand Paulina's abhorrence of such
experiments, and at every turn of the slight intrigue I had felt how
exasperating and belittling such a relation was bound to be between two
people who, had they been free, would have mated openly. And so from a
brief phase of imperfect forgetting I was driven back to a deeper and
more understanding remembrance....

"This second incarnation of Paulina was one of the strangest episodes
of the whole strange experience. Things she had said during our
extraordinary talk, things I had hardly heard at the time, came back to
me with singular vividness and a fuller meaning. I hadn't any longer
the cold consolation of believing in my own perspicacity: I saw that her
insight had been deeper and keener than mine.

"I remember, in particular, starting up in bed one sleepless night as
there flashed into my head the meaning of her last words: 'There was
no other way'; the phrase I had half-smiled at at the time, as a
parrot-like echo of the novel-heroine's stock farewell. I had never, up
to that moment, wholly understood why Paulina had come to my house that
night. I had never been able to make that particular act--which could
hardly, in the light of her subsequent conduct, be dismissed as a blind
surge of passion--square with my conception of her character. She was
at once the most spontaneous and the steadiest-minded wo