soul lost in one of her most miserable of moods. Harold spoke a few
words from time to time so that she should not perceive that he was
aware of her depression.

Her novel lay on her knees unread, and she sat, her eyes fixed,
staring into the heart of life. She had never seen so far into life
before; she was looking into the heart of life, which is death. He was
about to die--he had loved her even unto death; he had loved her even
while he was living with another woman. As she sat thinking, her novel
on her knees, she could see that other woman sitting by his death-bed.
Two candles were burning in the vast studio, and by their dim light
she saw the shadow of the profile on the pillow. She thought of him as
a man yearning for an ideal which he could never attain, and dying of
his yearning in the end! And that so beautiful and so holy an
aspiration should proceed from the common concubinage of a studio!
Suddenly she decided that Ralph was not worthy of her. Her instinct
had told her from the first that something was wrong. She had never
known why she had refused him. Now she knew.

But in the morning she was, as she put it herself, better able to see
things from a man's point of view, and she found some excuses for
Ralph's life. This connection had been contracted long ago. ... Ralph
had had to earn his living since he was sixteen--he had never been in
society; he had never known nice women: the only women he had known
were his models; what was he to do? A lonely life in a studio, his
meals brought in from the public-house, no society but those women.
... She could understand. ... Nevertheless, it was a miserable thing
to think that all the time he had been making love to her he had been
living with that woman. 'He used to leave her to come to meet me in
the park.'