Yet, through all the miserable workings of his mind the thought of Mercier's flabbiness was sweet to him. It gave him a curious consolation and support. True, it had been the chief agent in the process of deception; it had blinded him to Mercier's dangerous quality; it had given him a sense of false security; he could see, now, the fool he'd been to imagine that it would act as any deterrent to a woman so foredoomed as Violet. Thus it had in a measure brought about the whole catastrophe. At the same time it had saved him from the peculiar personal mortification such catastrophes entail. In comparison with Mercier he sustained no injury to his pride and vanity of sex. And Mercier's flabbiness did more for him than that. It took the sharpest sting from Violet's infidelity. It removed it to the region of insane perversities. It removed Violet herself from her place in memory, that place of magic and of charm where if she had remained she would have had power to hurt him. When he considered her letter yet again in the calmness of that thought, it struck him that Violet herself was offering him support and consolation. "You shouldn't have married me. You should have married a girl like Winny Dymond."--"I knew you'd marry her if I let you alone." Why, after all these years, had she confessed her treachery? Why had she confessed it now at the precise moment when she had left him? There was no need. It couldn't help her. No, but it was just possible (for she was quite intelligent) that she had seen how it might help him. It was possible that some sort of contrition had visited her in that last hour, and that she had meant to remind him that he was not utterly abandoned, that there was something left. That brought him to the lines, almost indecipherable, squeezed in her last hurried moment into the margin of the letter. "You mustn't be afraid of being fond of Baby. There was nothing between me and Leonard before July of last year." She had foreseen the supreme issue; she had provided for the worst sting, the unspeakable suspicion, the intolerable terror. It was as if she had calculated the precise point where her infidelity would touch him.