Mary Chaworth had lived unhappily with the handsome squire whom she had, so naturally, preferred to the fat boy from Harrow. He had been, as these red-faced, full-blooded Philistines are so apt to be, at once jealous, unfaithful, and brutal, wanting to "have it both ways,"--to push rivals brusquely out of his path, and to pursue his own coarse pleasures where he chose. He had forbidden his wife to see Byron. He had insisted upon her absence from Annesley at the time of Byron's return from Greece; and he had found her, whether willingly or unwillingly, compliant. But he had also, by his own conduct, caused scandals which had set the tongues of the neighbours wagging; and, in doing that, he had presumed too far. There had been a separation by mutual consent; and it was after the separation that the meeting with Byron took place. There was little about him now to remind Mary of the fat boy whom she had laughed at. The Turkish baths, the Epsom salts, and the regimen of biscuits and soda-water had done their work. He came to her as a man of ethereal beauty, fascinating manners, and undisputed genius; and he left other women--women of higher rank, greater importance, and more widely acknowledged charm--in order to come to her. Nor did he come with the triumphant air of a man who was resolved to dazzle her in order to avenge a slight. He came, as it were, because he could not help himself--because he felt cords drawing him--because this was his destiny and he must fulfil it, though he forfeited the whole world in doing so. Her case was hard. She was not one of the women who readily do desperate things in scorn of consequence. The traditions of her class, the claims of her family--the precepts, also, one imagines, of her religion--had too strong a hold on her for that. These very hesitations, no doubt,--so different from the "on coming" ways of Lady Caroline, and Lady Oxford's "terrible love," as Balzac phrases it, "of the woman of forty"--were a part of her charm for Byron. But she was very unhappy, and Byron was offering her a little happiness; and it was very, very difficult for her to refuse the gift. So the history of the matter seems, in a sentence or two, to have been this: that she was slow to yield, but yielded; that she had no sooner yielded than she repented; that her repentance left Byron a desperate, heart-broken man, profoundly cynical about women--so cynical about them that he could speak even of her, while he still loved her, to Medwin, as "like the rest of her sex, far from angelic"--ready to marry out of pique, or from any other motive equally unworthy.