She never was. She had known very certainly from the first that she never would be. Tonight she probed into that too--why she had been so sure, why she had never wavered. It was a more inner thing than just jealousy, resentment, hurt, revenge--though all those things were there too. But those were things that might have broken down, and this was not a thing that would break down. It was more particularly temperamental than any of those things. It was that thing in her which had always held her back from giving. She _had_ given--and then her giving had been outraged! Even now she burned in the thought of that. He had called out a thing in her that she had all along--just because she was as she was--resented having had called out. And then he had flouted it. Even after all those years there was tonight that old prickling of her scalp in thinking of it. The things she might have said--of its being her own friend, in her own house--she did not much dwell upon, even to herself. It was a more inner injury than that. Something in her that was curiously against her had been called to life by him--and then he had outraged what she had all along resented his finding in her. To give at all had been so tremendous a thing--then to have it lightly held! It outraged something that was simply outside the sphere of things forgivable. And that outraged thing had its own satisfaction. What he had called to life in her and then, as it seemed, left there unwanted, what he had made in her that was not herself--then left her with, became something else, something that made her life. From the first until now--or at any rate until two months ago when that boy came and forced her to look at herself--the thing in her that had been outraged became something that took the place of love, that was as the other pole of love, something that yielded a satisfaction of its own, a satisfaction intense as the things of love are intense, but cold, ordered, certain. It was the power to hurt; the power to bring pain by simply doing nothing. It was not tempestuously done; it had none of the uncertainty of passionate feeling; it had the satisfaction of power without effort, of disturbing and remaining undisturbed, of hurting and giving no sign. It was the revenge of what was deeply herself for calling her out from herself, for not wanting what was found in her that was not herself.