"
His truth broke down the barriers of her anger and despair. Something
welled up in her heart: it may have been love, it may have been inherent
womanliness.
"Why did you marry Christine?" she asked.
All at once he saw that she never could quite understand. Her stand-
point would still, in the end, be the stand-point of a woman. He saw
that she would have forgiven him, even had he not loved her, if he had
not married Christine. For the first time he knew something, the real
something, of a woman's heart. He had never known it before, because he
had been so false himself. He might have been evil and had a conscience
too; then he would have been wise. But he had been evil, and had had no
conscience or moral mentor from the beginning; so he had never known
anything real in his life. He thought he had known Christine, but now he
saw her in a new light, through the eyes of her sister from whose heart
he had gathered a harvest of passion and affection, and had burnt the
stubble and seared the soil forever. Sophie could never justify herself
in the eyes of her husband, or in her own eyes, because this man did not
love her. Even as he stood before her there, declaring himself to her as
wilfully wicked in all that he had said and done, she still longed
passionately for the thing that was denied her: not her lost truth back,
but the love that would have compensated for her suffering, and in some
poor sense have justified her in years to come.
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