When she had read these last words, she crushed the letter in her palm, clenching her fingers over it till the nails wounded the delicate flesh; and then she opened her hand, and employed herself in smoothing out the crumpled paper, as if her life depended on making the letter readable again. But her pains could not undo what her passion had done; and finding this, she tossed the ragged paper into the flames, and began to walk about the room in a distracted fashion, giving a little hysterical cry every now and then, and clasping her hands upon her forehead. Anger, humiliation, wounded love, wounded vanity, disappointment, disillusion, were all in that cry, and in the passionate beating of her heart, her stifled breath, her clenched hands. “He was laughing when he wrote that letter—I am sure he was laughing. There was not one serious moment, not one pang at leaving me! He has been laughing at me ever since he came to London. I have been his fool, his amusement. Other women have had his love, the guilty love that he praises! He has come to me straight from their wicked houses, their feasting, and riot, and drunkenness—has come and pretended to love poetry, and Scudéry’s romances, and music, and innocent conversation—come to rest himself after dissolute pleasures, bringing me the leavings of that hellish company! And I have reviled such women, and he has pretended an equal horror of them; and he was their slave all the time, and went from me to them, and made a jest of me for their amusement I know his biting raillery. And he was at the play-house day after day, where I could not go, sitting side by side with his Jezebels, laughing at filthy comedies, and at me that was forbidden to appear there. He had pleasures of which I knew nothing; and when I fancied our inmost souls moved in harmony, his thoughts were full of wanton women and their wanton jests, and he smiled at my childishness, and fooled me as children are fooled.” The thought was distraction. She plucked out handfuls of her pale gold hair, the pretty blonde hair which had been almost as famous in Paris as Beaufort’s or Madame de Longueville’s yellow locks. The thought of De Malfort’s ridicule cut her like a whalebone whip. She had fancied herself his Beatrice, his Laura, his Stella—a being to be worshipped as reverently as the stars, to make her lover happy with smiles and kindly words, to stand for ever a little way off, like a goddess in her temple, yet near enough to be adored. And fondly believing this to be her mission, having posed for the character, and filled it to her own fancy, she found that she had only been a dissolute man’s dupe all the time; and no doubt had been the laughing-stock of her acquaintance, who looked at the game. “And I was so proud of his devotion—I carried my slave everywhere with me. Oh, fool, fool, fool!”