Again and again she tried to awaken this dead affection, to call back this vanished love. She tried to remember the Bennett she had known; she told herself that he loved her; that he had said that the great things he had done had been done only with an eye to her approval; that she had been his inspiration no less than he had been hers; that he had fought his way back, not only to life, but to her. She thought of all he had suffered, of the hardships and privations beyond her imagination to conceive, that he had undergone. She tried to recall the infinite joy of that night when the news of his safe return had come to her; she thought of him at his very best--how he had always seemed to her the type of the perfect man, masterful, aggressive, accomplishing great projects with an energy and determination almost superhuman, one of the world's great men, whose name the world still shouted. She called to mind how the very ruggedness of his face; with its massive lines and harsh angles, had attracted her; how she had been proud of his giant's strength, the vast span of his shoulders, the bull-like depth of his chest, the sense of enormous physical power suggested by his every movement. But it was all of no effect. That Bennett was worse than dead to her. The Bennett that now came to her mind and imagination was the brutal, perverse man of the breakfast-room at Medford, coarse, insolent, intractable, stamping out all that was finest in her, breaking and flinging away the very gifts he had inspired her to offer him. It was nothing to him that she should stand degraded in the eyes of the world. He did not want her to be brave and strong. She had been wrong; it was not that kind of woman he desired. He had not acknowledged that she, too, as well as he--a woman as well as a man might have her principles, her standards of honour, her ideas of duty. It was not her character, then, that he prized; the nobility of her nature was nothing to him; he took no thought of the fine-wrought texture of her mind. How, then, did she appeal to him? It was not her mind; it was not her soul. What, then, was left? Nothing but the physical. The shame of it; the degradation of it! To be so cruelly mistaken in the man she loved, to be able to appeal to him only on his lower side! Lloyd clasped her hands over her eyes, shutting her teeth hard against a cry of grief and pain and impotent anger. No, no, now it was irrevocable; now her eyes were opened. The Bennett she had known and loved had been merely a creature of her own imagining; the real man had suddenly discovered himself; and this man, in spite of herself, she hated as a victim hates its tyrant.