Chapter 8

HE had ruthlessly abandoned her - that of course was what he had
done. Stransom made it all out in solitude, at leisure, fitting
the unmatched pieces gradually together and dealing one by one with
a hundred obscure points. She had known Hague only after her
present friend's relations with him had wholly terminated;
obviously indeed a good while after; and it was natural enough that
of his previous life she should have ascertained only what he had
judged good to communicate. There were passages it was quite
conceivable that even in moments of the tenderest expansion he
should have withheld. Of many facts in the career of a man so in
the eye of the world there was of course a common knowledge; but
this lady lived apart from public affairs, and the only time
perfectly clear to her would have been the time following the dawn
of her own drama. A man in her place would have "looked up" the
past - would even have consulted old newspapers. It remained
remarkable indeed that in her long contact with the partner of her
retrospect no accident had lighted a train; but there was no
arguing about that; the accident had in fact come: it had simply
been that security had prevailed. She had taken what Hague had
given her, and her blankness in respect of his other connexions was
only a touch in the picture of that plasticity Stransom had supreme
reason to know so great a master could have been trusted to
produce.

This picture was for a while all our friend saw: he caught his
breath again and again as it came over him that the woman with whom
he had had for years so fine a point of contact was a woman whom
Acton Hague, of all men in the world, had more or less fashioned.
Such as she sat there to-day she was ineffaceably stamped with him.
Beneficent, blameless as Stransom held her, he couldn't rid himself
of the sense that he had been, as who should say, swindled. She
had imposed upon him hugely, though she had known it as little as
he. All this later past came back to him as a time grotesquely
misspent. Such at least were his first reflexions; after a while
he found himself more divided and only, as the end of it, more
troubled. He imagined, recalled, reconstituted, figured out for
himself the truth she had refused to give him; the effect of which
was to make her seem to him only more saturated with her fate. He
felt her spirit, through the whole strangeness, finer than his own
to the very degree in which she might have been, in which she
certainly had been, more wronged. A women, when wronged, was
always more wronged than a man, and there were conditions when the
least she could have got off with was more than the most he could
have to bear. He was sure this rare creature wouldn't have got off
with the