She was humiliated publicly, and, as she saw it, the one course open to her was to make Sam suffer a humiliation as drastic and as public as her own. Though it hurt her, he must pay for it; though she died, he must be punished and, sincerely, she expected it to kill her. She lived in a garden of lies, and life without the illusion of her marriage would be as impossible as life without the fragrance of her poisonous flowers to Rappaccini’s daughter, but no matter for that. Ada must be revenged, and divorce, though it killed her, would be the greatest injury that she could do a politician and a pietistic publisher. She managed to square the circle, too. She was to die and make a murderer of him; she was to ruin his business and make a bankrupt of him; and at the same time she was to have the compensation of a handsome alimony. But perhaps vengeance is always irrational, and that is why it belongs to God. She dinned her word into Peter’s ears with the merciless reiteration of a hurt and howling child. It was her first word and her last, and appeals based on religion shattered themselves against it as fruitlessly as the appeal to reason. What she had said she had said: and she had said “Divorce.” Alternatives did not exist. For Peter, divorce ranged itself with the abominations of the world, a man-made legal subterfuge to evade the law of God. There might, conceivably, be occasions when divorce was to be condoned as the comparatively little wrong which did a great right, and he tried very honestly to see Ada’s as one of those heroic needs. He failed: he could not even see that Ada was hurt in soul, or in anything but pride. She was in a mood, not of spiritual revolt, but of peevish discontent.