"I have staked my all and lost," she said to herself with a sort of piteous grandiloquence; "there is nothing left me but duty and endurance; for though he _did_ love me, I doubt if he does so now. I am not necessary to his happiness. He does not and cannot understand me." Only unfortunately there were two or three little difficulties in the way of settling down comfortably to this conclusion. In the first place, notwithstanding her love of theorising, and of idealising even the woes of her lot, Eugenia was essentially honest, and being so she could not allow to herself that her conduct had been blameless, especially in this last and most serious disagreement. She had said things which she knew would gall and irritate her husband. In the morbid excitement of the moment she owned to herself that she had even wished them to have this effect, that his behaviour might excuse the violence of her indignation. And her conduct in general--her conduct ever since their marriage--ever since, at least, the first few weeks of careless happiness--how did that now appear to her from her new point of view? She knew she had been gentle, and in a superficial sense unselfish; with but very rare exceptions she had entirely merged her own wishes in those of her husband, had opposed nothing that he had suggested. Such submission, such sinking of her own individuality, had been unnatural and forced, completely foreign to her character. And, what had been its motive? Not the highest--far from it. It had not been that she really believed that in so doing she was acting her wifely part to perfection; it had not been earnest endeavour after the best within her reach that had prompted her, but rather, a cowardly, a selfish determination to close her eyes to the facts of her life--a weak refusal to see anything she did not want to see--the old wilful cry, "All or nothing; give me all or I die"--the shrinking from owning, even to herself, the self-willed impetuosity with which she had acted--the terror of acknowledging that she had been deceived, or rather, had deceived herself. "Yes," she said, "I have been all wrong together. How selfish I have been too! Months ago how indignant I used to get with poor Sydney if she ever attempted, as she used to call it, to `clip my wings for me.' How angry I was with papa when he suggested that we should defer our marriage till we knew a little more of each other! How selfish I was in Paris, too--selfish and unsympathising in Beauchamp's change of fortune! Perhaps, after all, it is no more than I have deserved that he should feel as he does now."