Somewhere about three o’clock Maggy got back to her flat. She was as calm as death, and knew exactly what she had to do. In her nature there were few complexities: intuition guided her most of the time. Now she simply did not want to live. She was not only heart-broken because of Woolf’s desertion but utterly crushed in spirit at having discovered that every foolish ideal with which she had endowed him had had no existence except in her imagination. That reflection made her despise herself as much as she despised him. If the breach could have occurred without such callous perfidy on his part, she might still have retained her self-respect. How much more preferable that would have been, even though it meant she might have gone on loving him. How she had loved him! She had poured out to him all the passionate first-love of an exceedingly ardent nature; she had gloried in him, suffered for him. She had been content with an illicit position, even to the extent of refraining from urging him to legitimize their union when there was a reason for it—one that would have stirred the compassion of any other man. She had not thought herself good enough to be his wife, because, in effect if not in direct words, he had told her so. She saw him now as he really was, an unutterable cad, despicable, utterly snobbish. He had married with the sole object of associating himself with a titled family. That it was in bad odor made no difference to him. To hear the announcement or to read in print of "Mr. Woolf and the Lady Susan Woolf" had no doubt been the prevailing factor with him. It was clear enough to Maggy. He had not considered her a fit wife for himself because she was a chorus-girl, yet he had married a woman infinitely more common in the slangy sister of a decadent peer. And all the time he had been contemplating this marriage she had made a jest of it, teasing him about a honeymoon abroad, unwittingly joking about the terrible truth! To think of it was gall and wormwood. She had trusted the man. Her own honesty had made her assume that he was incapable of deception. Conformity with the easy code of honor which men generally adhere to, even in an irregular union, was all she had expected. It had been denied her. She was filled with a distaste for life. It could be so simply ended. There was a bottle of laudanum in the cupboard over her washstand. Without any hesitation she poured its contents into a tumbler and drank it off. It tasted so nasty that she ate a chocolate afterwards. Then she locked her door and lay down on her bed. Nothing in the world mattered now, not even Alexandra. She was too weary to think of her, even to analyze what she believed to be her own last sensations. Mentally exhausted she fell asleep.