How was it possible to be near madame, and not love her?

"And would you go--anywhere with me?"

The scene came back to her in the night watches. For the little maid had
wept and vowed eternal fidelity.

It was not--until the first faint herald of the morning that Honora could
bring herself to pronounce the fateful thing that stood between her and
happiness, that threatened to mar the perfection of a heaven-born love
--Divorce! And thus, having named it resolutely several times, the demon
of salvation began gradually to assume a kindly aspect that at times
became almost benign. In fact, this one was not a demon at all, but a
liberator: the demon, she perceived, stalked behind him, and his name was
Notoriety. It was he who would flay her for coquetting with the
liberator.

What if she were flayed? Once married to Chiltern, once embarked upon
that life of usefulness, once firmly established on ground of her own
tilling, and she was immune. And this led her to a consideration of those
she knew who had been flayed. They were not few, and a surfeit of
publicity is a sufficient reason for not enumerating them here. And
during this process of exorcism Notoriety became a bogey, too: he had
been powerless to hurt them. It must be true what Chiltern had said that
the world was changing. The tragic and the ridiculous here joining hands,
she remembered that Reggie Farwell had told her that he had recently made
a trip to western New York to inspect a house he had built for a
"remarried" couple who were not wholly unknown. The dove-cote, he had
called it. The man, in his former marriage, had been renowned all up and
down tidewater as a rake and a brute, and now it was an exception when he