"Bewildered and overwhelmed by the loss which to me had all the novelty and keenness of a disaster of yesterday, though I found that many years had gone by since, in reality, it was completed, I fled from the spot I had so fondly sought, and hurried up to London on no fixed errand, with no determined idea, yet vaguely desiring to do something. Scarcely arrived, I met a man whom I had known in India. He asked me to dine with him, and I complied; because to refuse would have required explanation, and the affirmative was more easily given. I did not mean to keep my engagement; yet when the hour came, so intolerable had I become to myself--so poignant and loathsome were my thoughts--that I went, so to lose for a few moments the present sense of ill. It was a bachelor's dinner, and there were, in addition to myself, three or four other guests--among them a Mr. Neville. From the moment this man opened his lips to speak, I took a violent dislike to him. He was, and always must have been, the man whom among ten thousand I should have marked out to abhor. He was cold, proud, and sarcastic, withal a decayed dandy, turned cynic--who, half despising himself, tried wholly to disdain his fellow-creatures. A man whose bosom never glowed with a generous emotion, and who took pride in the sagacity which enabled him to detect worms and corruption in the loveliness of virtue. A poor, mean-spirited fellow, despite his haughty outside; and then when he spoke of women, how base a thing he seemed! his disbelief in their excellence, his contemptuous pity, his insulting love, made my blood boil. To me there was something sacred in a woman's very shadow. Was she evil, I regarded her with the pious regret with which I might view a shrine desecrated by sacrilegious hands--the odour of sanctity still floated around the rifled altar; I never could regard them as mere fellow-creatures--they were beings of a better species, sometimes gone astray in the world's wilderness, but always elevated above the best among us. For Alithea's sake I respected every woman. How much good I knew of them! Generous, devoted, delicate--their very faults were but misdirected virtues; and this animal dared revile beings of whose very nature he could form no conception. A burden was lifted from my soul when he left us. "'It is strange,' said our host, 'that Neville should indulge in this kind of talk; he is married to the most beautiful, and the best woman in the world. Much younger than himself, she yet performs her duties as a wife with steadiness and cheerfulness; lovely beyond her sex, she is without its weakness; to please some jealous freak of his, she has withdrawn herself from the world, and buried herself alive at his seat in the North. How she can endure an eternal tête-à-tête with that empty, conceited, and arrogant husband of hers is beyond any guessing.'