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252 had opened its ultimate doors; her imagination no longer dropped back, as it had done so often of late, because it could invent nothing further than the endless repetition of what she had already achieved; it dropped back now because it was dazzled with all that was laid open before it, at all that was undoubtedly hers. And if at the moment when she had chosen, when she had hesitated as to whether she should let friendship, loyalty, all those bourgeois virtues, be a feather of weight in the turning of the scale, and had found they weighed not even that, it seemed now that the very existence of such motives helped but to kindle the fever with which she burned. At this moment it was the very fact that Maud was her friend, that Maud was the sweetest, kindest soul in the world, that heaped fuel on this conflagration of herself. That Edgar loved her was but another faggot, that she had a child by him enkindled it, and that now in the house was Maud's child, Charlie's child

That was fresh material, different material. Till that came into her mind she had but thought of Maud as a nonentity, though a thing to be burned, to be used as fuel. But at this she took a different view. Maud, in her thought, became an enemy, one who had got possessed of what should have belonged to Lucia. She had dared to love that possession, she had dared to use it. Lucia was not jealous of her—the time for jealousy was past; jealousy had dropped dead the moment she had just beckoned to Charlie out there on the terrace after dinner; it was absurd to be jealous of one who no more than imagined she had a treasure in her keeping. Yet she was the nominal possessor of that treasure, and for that reason Lucia hated her. Hate, at least, was in her heart, but she covered it up. She let it lie there; it did not matter. It was so unimportant compared to that which really concerned her. All else was unimportant likewise, though again she felt a certain vague hostility when she thought of her child. For it was Edgar's.

The hostility was not quite over yet, and she wanted to be done with such emotions. But the next subject was of graver import, for it was Edgar. It was no trouble to forgive Maud for what she had done in defrauding herself, the rightful owner by the titledeed of love, of Charlie, especially since now her pilfering—for so it was—had proved so abortive, but it was a different matter with Edgar. He had acquiesced in Lucia's cheating herself, had made her suppose that love held nothing beyond this parody of married life which she had shared with him. For three years he had led