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208 both in the desolating inability to care for anything in the months that followed, and also in other ways. What it cost him in hard cash did not trouble him. After all, he was infinitely her debtor; it was she who had let him see (though she had plucked the vision away again) to what height of ecstasy his own average human nature could rise.

What must a woman of that kind be made of? he wondered to himself. Was she so grossly stupid that she never had a glimpse of what she meant to him, or was she so utterly hard that, having seen that, she had not the decency anyhow to go into mourning, as it were, for him just for a little? Stupidity he could not accuse her of; there was no one of such lightning-like power of intuition to divine the mood of a man. No; she must have seen it and known it, and brushed it from her, as one brushes a fly off one's coat. For not a month after that she had left London with Bilton, whom she never professed to care for. But he was rich, and certainly he had done a great deal for her, for he had taken her from her position of actress, seen her capability of dramatic impersonation, and got her play after play where she had to behave like herself, till now, in a certain sort of rôle, there was no woman who touched her. Also, he had somehow made her the fashion; he had gauged his age correctly, and given it what it wanted. He had seen the trend of society both in England and America—seen its hardness, its heartlessness, its imperative need of being amused, its passion for money, and for its stage he had given it Mrs. Emsworth, an incarnation of itself.

Yes; she was hard, hard, hard as her own diamonds, and as brilliant, as many-faceted. Sometimes out of her, as out of them, a divinely soft light would shine, but if you tried to warm yourself in that mellow blaze there was no heat there; if in the excellent splendour and softness of the light you would think for a moment that there was a