So far her solitude had been successful, but beyond that it had been a complete failure. For the larger of the two reasons which had induced her to come here remained, and she could not even now conjecture what in the future should be her attitude to Jim. With this problem she had wrestled and struggled in vain, and it seemed to her, in these first days of her consciousness as to her essential relations to him, that all her life-long consistency of thought and habit on such a point were cancelled and worthless. The truth was that she had not known at all before that she was really capable of passion. Her nature, including something far deeper and stronger than mere physical nature, had till quite lately been dormant; she had been ignorant all her life of what the longing for another meant; all her life she had judged men and women by a blind standard which did not really measure that to which it was applied. All her life she had labelled immorality as vulgar, and, as such, she shrugged her shoulders at it and passed by. But now it was beginning to be burned into her that it was not her fastidiousness that labelled things vulgar, but her ignorance. She had thought Blanche Devereux vulgar because she herself had not understood. Now she was afraid she was beginning to understand, and with the gradual comprehension came growing bewilderment. And step by step with the bewilderment marched an inward tumult of ecstasy, of which she had not known herself capable. A sort of horrified wonder at herself was there, and withal a singing in her heart. It had awoke, and, like the roar of the sea which drowns the idle clatter of the Corniche road, it made a huge soft tumult. This, then, was the problem she had brought unsolved from London, and which, she was afraid, she would bring back there without solution. The knowledge of it had burst upon her on the evening when Jack had told her what he had heard said of her, and her first conscious utterance that showed she knew of its existence was when that involuntary cry, "Ah, don't touch me!" came uninvited to her lips. Her long and gradual estrangement from her husband had immeasurably widened at that moment. In an instant his figure had leaped to remote horizons, and she had but to turn her head to see how close beside her stood another, he of whom her husband had spoken. This she had not known before; but the knowledge had come in a flash, staining backwards, as it were, through the past pages of her life, so that it seemed to her that she had loved him since the time when they were boy and girl together, and it made her view her married life with an incredulous horror. And by what sinister revelation had she gained this knowledge? For it was the fact that people spoke of Jim as her lover that had made her definitely aware she loved him. And it had been Jack through whom this knowledge was conveyed.