‘Will you tell me what your real feeling about this is; you seem very calm, and yet----’ ‘And yet I loved him, you mean.’ Lady Geraldine nodded. ‘Yes, I loved him; and I suppose if this had happened two months ago I should have gone nearly mad with grief. But a curious change has been taking place during that time. It used to seem as if great floods of emotion came over me, enfolded me, and took possession of me. I had no power to resist them. One day I suddenly found I could, as it were, swim through; I knew what I was doing; I could guide and control myself; I could use the emotion as I pleased.’ ‘Yes, yes; I believe I know what you mean; go on telling me.’ ‘Well, that is what it comes to. In real life you get an emotion which masters you; in art, in acting, in all works of genius, I suppose, you master an emotion. That is why artists are set apart from the rest of the world; they cannot enjoy the common emotion long, they demand too much from it.’ ‘And do you not regret your loss at all?’ ‘Oh, we are all human, of course. I loved him, but still I feared him. He made me see things in his way: I had no freedom of judgment. When he was with me I thought he was a splendidly clever person; even when I found out how bad he was, and what terrible things he had done, he only had to make some ridiculous excuse for me to believe every word he said.’ ‘Don’t you think it is a good thing for you that he is dead? Don’t you feel that if you had seen much more of him you would have become a thoroughly bad woman?’ ‘Yes, I do. I sometimes wonder even now if I can get away altogether from his influence. But how did you know this? What made you imagine it?’ ‘I will tell you exactly why. You know we were quite ignorant that he had a wife until about a fortnight ago. I must confess to you that from the first day I saw him I would have married him at any moment if he had asked me, and given up everything in the world for him. I found out by degrees what he was, and I thought that if it were true, I could not bear that he should live. And now that he is dead I am glad. I feel a weight is off my soul.’ ‘Yes,’ whispered Grace Travers, ‘that is just what I feel, a weight is off my soul: to live with him was to be morally contaminated. Almost the last time I talked to him, I remember feeling as if it would be a glorious thing to be a great criminal, and that if you could not rule by fair means, you should rule by foul. George had such a horror of mediocrity.’ ‘He thought anything better than that, eh?’ ‘Yes, I believe the only person who could really fascinate him would be some one who could make him suffer terribly.’ ‘Was there anything that could make him suffer?’ ‘No, I don’t think there was, he always took things so easily. But he didn’t want to die; he hated the thought of it. I can’t think how he ever came to kill himself.’