For that woman's _solutions_ remained as doubtful to him as ever. He would go back to that strange little house where she kept her strange court, meet her eager eyes, and be roused at once to battle. How they had argued! He knew that she had less hope than ever of persuading him even to modify his view of the points at issue between the Government and his own group. She could not hope for a moment that any act of his would be likely to stand between Maxwell and defeat. He had not talked of his adventures to Fontenoy--would rather, indeed, that Fontenoy knew nothing of them. But he and she knew that Fontenoy, so far, had little to fear from them. And yet she had not turned from him. To her personal mood, to her wifely affection even, he must appear more plainly than ever as the callous and selfish citizen, ready and glad to take his own ease while his brethren perished. He had been sceptical and sarcastic; he had declined to accept her evidence; he had shown a persistent preference for the drier and more brutal estimate of things. Yet she had never parted from him without gentleness, without a look in her beautiful eyes that had often tormented his curiosity. What did it mean? Pity? Or some unspoken comment of a personal kind she could not persuade her womanly reticence to put into words? Or, rather: had she some distant inkling of the real truth--that he was beginning to hate his own convictions--to feel that to be right with Fontenoy was nothing, but to be wrong with her would be delight? What absurdity! With a strong effort, he pulled himself together--steadied his rushing pulse. It was like someone waking at night in a nervous terror, and feeling the pressure of some iron dilemma, from which he cannot free himself--cold vacancy and want on the one side, calamity on the other. For that cool power of judgment in his own case which he had always possessed did not fail him now. He saw everything nakedly and coldly. His marriage was not three months old, but no spectator could have discussed its results more frankly than he was now prepared to discuss them with himself. It was monstrous, no doubt. He felt his whole position to be as ugly as it was abnormal. Who could feel any sympathy with it or him? He himself had been throughout the architect of his own misfortune. Had he not rushed upon his marriage with less care--relatively to the weight of the human interest in such a matter--than an animal shows when it mates?