He did not want her to be brave and strong. She had been wrong; it was
not that kind of woman he desired. He had not acknowledged that she,
too, as well as he--a woman as well as a man might have her principles,
her standards of honour, her ideas of duty. It was not her character,
then, that he prized; the nobility of her nature was nothing to him; he
took no thought of the fine-wrought texture of her mind. How, then, did
she appeal to him? It was not her mind; it was not her soul. What, then,
was left? Nothing but the physical. The shame of it; the degradation of
it! To be so cruelly mistaken in the man she loved, to be able to appeal
to him only on his lower side! Lloyd clasped her hands over her eyes,
shutting her teeth hard against a cry of grief and pain and impotent
anger. No, no, now it was irrevocable; now her eyes were opened. The
Bennett she had known and loved had been merely a creature of her own
imagining; the real man had suddenly discovered himself; and this man,
in spite of herself, she hated as a victim hates its tyrant.

But her grief for her vanished happiness--the happiness that this love,
however mistaken, had brought into her life--was pitiful. Lloyd could
not think of it without the choke coming to her throat and the tears
brimming her dull-blue eyes, while at times a veritable paroxysm of
sorrow seized upon her and flung her at full length upon her couch, her
face buried and her whole body shaken with stifled sobs. It was gone, it
was gone, and could never be called back. What was there now left to her
to live for? Why continue her profession? Why go on with the work? What
pleasure now in striving and overcoming? Where now was the exhilaration
of battle with the Enemy, even supposing she yet had the strength to
continue the fight? Who was there now to please, to approve, to
encourage? To what end the days of grave responsibilities, the long,
still nights of vigil?

She began to doubt herself. Bennett, the man, had loved his work for its
own sake. But how about herself, the woman? In what spirit had she gone
about her work? Had she been genuine, after all? Had she not undertaken
it rather as a means than as an end--not because she cared for it, but
because she thought he would approve, because she had hoped by means of
the work she would come into closer companionship with him? She wondered
if this must always be so--the man loving the work for the work's sake;
the woman, more complex, weaker, an