More and more, as the days went by, he saw himself as the deserted bull; and, so seeing, swore that he would teach the whole herd a lesson. The herd had its rules, its shibboleths; but he was above all rules, above all shibboleths. Let the herd murmur if it dared. His wife and her lover could rot in the mire they had pashed for themselves. The lone bull would not even deign to horn their flanks. So, arrogance and cruelty in his secret heart; lash-marks of the Furies red across his secret loins; feigning himself unhurt, uncaring; feigning himself ignorant; feigning even solicitude for the health of his absent wife, Hector Brunton went his conquering conquered way. CHAPTER XIII 1 In the heart of Julia Cavendish--those earliest days--was neither hatred nor cruelty; only a terrible numbness as from a blow. Ronnie, her own son, had struck her! At first she could not bring herself to believe the happening real. His letter, read and reread, conveyed nothing. But soon the letter grew real enough--so real that Julia's imagination, peering between the lines, could actually see him with the woman who had inspired it; with the woman who had ruined her boy's career. Her first impulse was to go to them, to go swiftly; to say to the woman, "It's not too late--even now. Return to your husband--give my son back to me." Yet every traditional instinct in Julia fought against that solution. All her life she had schooled herself to the belief that adultery--in a woman--was the unforgivable sin. Men, of course, were never guilty of "adultery," only of "lapses." Modern society, so pitifully lax, so given over to the sentimental impulse, might forgive both parties. Julia Cavendish could not. She, in her eugenic wisdom, knew that individual sin--in a woman--must earn individual punishment. Mrs. Brunton, therefore, could not return to her husband. But if Mrs. Brunton did not return, how could Mrs. Brunton give back Ronnie? Mrs. Brunton probably took the ordinary tolerant view about divorce; the view that she, Julia, had spent a lifetime in combating. Not that her own public position on the divorce question counted! At any moment since Ronnie's birth she would have sacrificed more than public position for him. But this, this was a question of beliefs. Love might urge forgiveness but how could love countenance sin--a deadly sin? For a week that stubborn old doctrine of deadly sin, which Julia had imbibed with a bookish Christianity--the same bookish "Christianity" which still tolerates the ghastly word "heretic," continued to harden her heart as it blinded her intellect; for a week she held on, with a tenacity almost Hebraic, to the fixed idea of the _woman_ taken in adultery. Then, as the numbness of the blow warmed into pain, her heart softened, and her intellect--momentarily freed by sorrow from the blindness of all formal faiths--saw a ray of light.