suspect—we are following Lucia into the profundity of her shallowness—he must never suspect that she failed to find all he found in their marriage; still less, of course, must he suspect that she had found what he was powerless to give her. And soberly and literally it was true that in this resolve she was able to detect a sort of heroism. She would not wreck his life, she would not wreck Maud's, by acting up to what she called the finest instincts of her nature. What she did not add was that she was unprepared to wreck her own life by so emphatic an assertion of the paramount claim of love.
Already she felt as if it was a fine thing to do this, and though she very seldom cried, her eyes grew dim at the thought of her ] own heroism.
But she did not renounce the love that had thus suddenly dawned on her. It would be wicked—to herself she used that identical word—to crush all that was finest in her nature. Self-deception, it may be hoped, touched bottom there, and her self-deception was triumphant.
It is hard to follow the working of so superficial and trivial a soul. A hero, though most of us are cast in no heroic mould, is easy to understand; he casts all but the worthiest aside, and follows that. Nor would it be difficult to follow the frankly worthless, those who have never the slightest impulse towards a level that is higher than their normal one. Nor, till now, was it difficult to follow the uniform selfishness of our poor climber. But at this moment the puzzling and the inevitable thing happened; love, the finest impulse she had ever known, drove her, by force of these years of self-seeking, into the meanest course that she had yet pursued. She did not, in justice to her, plan an intrigue, but for the sake of love she planned to deceive those who best loved and trusted her, in order that she should not be compelled to sacrifice anything. Of the love that recognizes the stern validity of a moral code she was, of course, hopelessly incapable; of the love that will reck nothing of the moral code, defy convention, stamp on friendship, repudiate obligations, she had been capable, though only for a moment. What she was completely capable of was a projected course of careful deceit, in order—though she made no plans—to give love a chance. She did not put it so brutally to herself; indeed, so brutal a statement of the real state of her mind never occurred to her. She said only that she would not wreck the lives of others. And even that to her microscopic
