Tuesday the 22nd came, but Captain Chancellor set off on his visit to Marshlands alone. Eugenia was ill--too ill to leave her room, though better than she had been. The restrained suffering of the last few weeks, the unhealthily reserved and isolated life she had begun to live--she to whom sympathy was as the air she breathed--all had told upon her; and the excitement of the painful discussion with her husband the day of Lady Hereward's unfortunate visit, had been the finishing stroke. After that she gave way altogether. She was not sorry to be ill. On the whole, she felt it the best thing that could have happened to her. She was glad to be alone. She was very glad now that Sydney's visit had been deferred. With all her haste and impulsiveness, there was in her a curious mixture of clear-headedness and reasoning power. She liked to understand things-- to get to the bottom of them. Now that she had left off pretending to deceive herself with false representations--now that she had ceased to try to cheat herself into imagining she was happy--she found a strange, half-morbid satisfaction in dissecting and analysing the whole--her own character and her husband's; the past lives of both, and the influences that had made them what they were; the special, definite causes of their discordancy. "He is not--I see it plainly now," she said to herself, with a curious, hopeless sort of calm, "he is not in the very least the man I imagined. _That_ Beauchamp has never existed. Is it just, therefore, that I should blame the real one for not being what he never was?" Here she got a little puzzled, and tried to look at it from a fresh point of view. "And being what he is, and no more, why should I not make the best of it? It seems to me there is something repulsive and unworthy in the thought. I would almost rather go on being miserable. Yet I suppose many women have had to do it. I could fancy Sydney, for instance, doing it, and never letting any one suspect she had had it to do. In time, perhaps, I may find it easier, or grow callous." Then she would set to work to think out a new role for herself--that of an utterly lonely, impossibly self-reliant woman, living a life of self-abnegation, of lofty devotion to duty--unappreciated devotion, unsuspected abnegation--such as no woman has ever yet lived since women were. Seen through the softening medium of physical weakness, not amounting to actual suffering, this new way of looking at things came to have a certain attraction for her. The idea of total and lasting sacrifice of all hopes of personal happiness, all yearning for sympathy, was grand enough and impossible enough to recommend itself greatly to this ardent, extreme nature, to which anything was better than second bests, nothing so antagonistic as compromise in any form.