He managed to shut Gita out of his thoughts for a week, and then welcomed her back. And he thought of her not only as a woman but as a case. He understood that case thoroughly. He also knew its cure, but he was helpless even if she loved him and she did not; although he never doubted he could win her if it were not for the malignancy of Fate. If her husband were any man but his best friend!—but like all men’s men of breeding he had a high and inexorable code. His outbreak at Mrs. Pleyden’s had been irresistible. Well, let her know it. Why not? He was entitled to that much. And he approached her on the night of her party no more than courtesy demanded, and devoted himself to Polly, who always diverted him. He had asked no questions of Elsie that night he had been summoned to the manor to save Bylant’s life, but he had thought of little else, arriving at conclusions not far from the truth. Whether she had recognized Bylant or believed him to be a felonious intruder, she had defended not her house from outrage but her body; that body a peculiar neurosis had made more sacred than virtue itself. He fancied he could reconstruct the scene! Eustace had been a brute and a fool and got his just deserts. As a man he might sympathize with him but as a scientist he felt only arrogant contempt. By this time he knew Gita’s history. What either she or Polly had not confided in moments of expansion, Elsie’s keen analytical mind had divined, and she had found both pleasure and profit in discussing the girl with her brother. Pelham felt an immense pity, and if a surgical operation would have cured her he would have contributed his services as impersonally as when he cut a neat incision and extracted a poisonous appendix. But the knife must come out of the blue. It must find its own way—down through the stagnant waters, and release the sap underneath. He might have been the man to watch it fall if he had not been compelled to walk down that staircase beside her holding the candelabra over her head and feeling as if he were sinking under the weight of the stone in his breast. If the time were two centuries earlier he would have snatched her from Eustace at the foot of the stair and dashed off with her into the darkness. But illusions had fled. That golden haze had gone whence it came. Men had become mere travesties of themselves.