What in truth was it that had happened to him? After weeks of a growing madness he had finally lost his self-command, had spoken passionately, as only love speaks, to a married woman, who had no thought for any man in the world but her husband, a woman who had immediately--so he had always read the riddle of Maxwell's behaviour--reported every incident of his conversation with her to the husband, and had then tried her best, with an exquisite kindness and compunction, to undo the mischief her own charm had caused. For that effort, in the first instance, George, under the shock of his act and her pain, had been, at intervals, speechlessly grateful to her; all his energies had gone into pitiful, eager response. Now, her attempt, and Maxwell's share in it, seemed to have laid him under a weight he could no longer bear. His acceptance of Maxwell's invitation had finally exhausted his power of playing the superhuman part to which she had invited him. He wished with all his heart he had not accepted it! From the moment of her greeting--with its mixture of shrinking and sweetness--he had realised the folly, the humiliation even, of his presence in her house. He could not rise--it was monstrous, ludicrous almost, that she should wish it--to what she seemed to ask of him. What had he been in love with? He looked at her once or twice in bewilderment. Had not she herself, her dazzling, unconscious purity, debarred him always from the ordinary hopes and desires of the sensual man? His very thought had moved in awe of her, had knelt before her. Throughout there had been this half-bitter glorying in the strangeness of his own case. The common judgment in its common vileness mattered nothing to him. He had been in love with love, with grace, with tenderness, with delight. He had seen, too late, a vision of the _best_; had realised what things of enchantment life contains for the few, for the chosen--what woman at her richest can be to man. And there had been a cry of personal longing--personal anguish.