he pledged himself to a life of falsehood, and had he
yet to know what torment awaited him at the hands of the avenging
truth? Truth, as he had once defined it, was the soul of the fact. It
was the fact that he was going to marry Flossie; but it was not the
truth. Only love could have given it a soul and made it true. If he
was bound to maintain that it had a soul when it hadn't, that was
where the falseness would come in.

Yet no. He might go mad by thinking about it, but life after all was
simpler than thought. Things righted themselves when you left off
thinking about them. He would be unhappy; but that could only make
Flossie unhappy if she cared for him. And in a year's time, when he
had left off thinking, she would have left off caring. He had shrewdly
divined that what Flossie chiefly wanted was to have children; or if
she did not want it, Nature wanted it for her, which came to the same
thing. As for mating her to a man of genius, that was just Nature's
wanton extravagance. Maddox had once said that any man would have done
as well, perhaps better; Flossie wouldn't care. Well, he would give
her children, and she would care for them. Indeed, he sincerely hoped
that for him she would not care. It would make things simpler.
Maddox, he remembered, had also said that she was the sort of woman
who would immolate her husband for her children; whereas Poppy--but
then, Maddox was a beast.

It never occurred for a moment to him to throw Flossie over. That, he
had settled once for all, could not now be done. Circumstances
conspired to make the thing irrevocable. Her utter dependence on him,
the fact that she had no home but the one he offered her, no choice
between marriage and earning her own living in a way she hated, the
flagrant half-domestic intimacy in which they had been living, more
than all, the baseness of his past love, and the inadequacy of his
present feeling for her, both calling on him to atone, all these
things made a promise of marriage as binding as the actual tie. Their
engagement might possibly have been broken off at any of its earlier
stages without profound dishonour. It was one thing to jilt a girl
within a decent interval of the first congratulations; another thing
altogether to abandon her with her trousseau on her hands. It had gone
so far that his failure at the last moment would be the grossest
insult he could offer her.

Gross indeed; yet not so gross but that he could think of one still
gr