to look at her as at his punishment, the punishment of his life.
Before--always before--Sophie had been vague and indistinct: seen
to-day, forgotten tomorrow; and previous to meeting her scores had
affected his senses, affected them not at all deeply.

She was like a date in history to a boy who remembers that it meant
something, but what, is not quite sure. But the meaning and definiteness
were his own. Out of the irresponsibility of his nature, out of the
moral ineptitude to which he had been born, moral knowledge came to him
at last. Love had not done it; neither the love of Christine, as
strong as death, nor the love of his sister, the deepest thing he ever
knew--but the look of a woman wronged. He had inflicted on her the
deepest wrong that may be done a woman. A woman can forgive passion
and ruin, and worse, if the man loves her, and she can forgive herself,
remembering that to her who loved much, much was forgiven. But out of
wilful idleness, the mere flattery of the senses, a vampire feeding upon
the spirits and souls of others, for nothing save emotion for emotion's
sake--that was shameless, it was the last humiliation of a woman. As it
were, to lose joy, and glow, and fervour of young, sincere and healthy
life, to whip up the dying vitality and morbid brain of a consumptive!

All in a flash he saw it, realised it, and hated himself for it. He knew
that as long as he lived, an hour or ten years, he never could redeem
himself; never could forgive himself, and never buy back the life that
he had injured. Many a time in his life he had kissed and ridden away,
and had been unannoyed by conscience. But in proportion as conscience
had neglected him before, it ground him now between the stones, and he
saw himself as he was. Come of a gentleman's family, he knew he was
no gentleman. Having learned the forms and courtesies of life, having
infused his whole career with a spirit of gay bonhomie, he knew that in
truth he was a swaggerer; that bad taste, infamous bad taste, had marked
almost everything that he had done in his life. He had passed as one of
the nobility, but he knew that all true men, all he had ever met, must
have read him through and through. He had understood this before to a
certain point, had read himself to a certain mark of gauge, but he had
never been honestly and truly a man until this moment. His soul was
naked before his eyes. It had been naked before, but he had laughed.
Born without real remors