up? Pooh! She writes it. She writes anything. And that
vilest, I say, I will make more enviable, more Clotilde! he thundered
her signature in an amazement, broken suddenly by the sight of her
putting her name to the letter. She had done that, written her name to
the renunciation of him! No individual could bear the sight of such
a crime, and no suffering man could be appeased by a single victim to
atone for it. Her sex must be slaughtered; he raged against the woman;
she became that ancient poisonous thing, the woman; his fury would not
distinguish her as Clotilde, though the name had started him, and it was
his knowledge of the particular sinner which drew down his curses on the
sex. He twisted his body, hugging at his breast as if he had her letter
sticking in his ribs. The letter was up against his ribs, and he thumped
it, crushed it, patted it; he kissed it, and flung it, stamped on it,
and was foul-mouthed. Seeing it at his feet, he bent to it like a man
snapped in two, lamenting, bewailing himself, recovering sight of her
fragmentarily. It stuck in his ribs, and in scorn of the writer, and
sceptical of her penning it, he tugged to pull it out, and broke the
shaft, but left the rankling arrow-head:--she had traced the lines, and
though tyranny racked her to do that thing, his agony followed her
hand over the paper to her name, which fixed and bit in him like the
deadly-toothed arrow-head called asp, and there was no uprooting it.
The thing lived; her deed was the woman; there was no separating them:
witness it in love murdered.

O that woman! She has murdered love. She has blotted love completely
out. She is the arch-thief and assassin of mankind--the female Apollyon.
He lost sight of her in the prodigious iniquity covering her sex with
a cowl of night, and it was what women are, what women will do, the one
and all alike simpering simulacra that men find them to be, soulless,
clogs on us, bloodsuckers! until a feature of the particular sinner
peeped out on him, and brought the fresh agony of a reminder of his
great-heartedness. 'For that woman--Tresten, you know me--I would
have sacrificed for that woman fortune and life, my hope, my duty,
my immortality. She knew it, and she--look!' he unwrinkled the letter
carefully for it to be legible, and clenched it in a ball.' Signs her
name, signs her name, her name!--God of heaven! it would be incredible
in a holy chronicle--signs her name to the infamous harlotry! See:
"C