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332 not get the worst of it? Absolute faithfulness to a man meant being treated as Nina was treated, as—Basil had treated her. She stopped still in the middle of the road, her head bowed and her hands clenched in the physical suffering that always came with this thought. It hurt her too much—the sting of it had only grown sharper with time—and she saw that it might be a perpetual suffering, and that she could never get free from Basil, no matter what he did. He was to her what Edith was to Egisto—a passion—and she felt that she might hate him, too. One could not help hating unkindness, selfishness, hardness—and Basil had injured her, had made her harder and more indifferent about hurting him. No—more that that. She wanted to hurt him.

She walked on a few steps and stopped again, and repeated to herself, recognising it fully for the first time, that she wanted to hurt Basil. And it would be easy to hurt him—he had shown himself susceptible enough. He had even said that she could make him suffer infinitely more than she could suffer through him. The world said, too, that a man's infidelity was nothing; even the wife's pride need not suffer because of it. … Well, all that she knew was that she suffered, world or no world, convention or no convention—and that the pain of her jealousy was as sharp as her love of Basil's beauty. …