As this was the first victory he had ever obtained over his
egotistical nature, Eustace felt most unjustifiably proud, and viewed
his actions with great self-complacency, therefore the good results of
such victory merely became egotism in another form. His attitude
towards Lady Errington had certainly altered, but not for the better,
as the fantastic adoration he had formerly felt towards a vision of
his own creation had changed to an earthly love for the real woman, in
which there was mingled more of sensuality than platonism. Eustace was
certainly not a coarse man in any sense of the word, but he had
regarded the visionary Lady Errington so long as his own special
property, withheld from him by the accident of her marriage with
Guy, that when he saw the flesh-and-blood woman _riant_ in all her
newly-found vitality, he viewed her as a Sultan might view a fresh
odalisque added to his _serail_. The pale lily had changed into the
rich red rose, and the spiritual being of his fevered imagination had
taken the form of a beautiful woman, full of temptation to an ardent
lover.
Any sensible man would have seen from the short conversation he had
had with Lady Errington that love for the child filled her heart to
the exclusion of all else, but Eustace, with supreme egotism, deemed
that she loved the child simply because her husband was not worthy of
her affection and when he deigned to worship her she would certainly
forget the pale passion of maternal love under the fierce ardour of
his devotion.
With this idea in his mind it was no wonder he felt that he was
exercising great self-denial in trying to bring husband and wife
together, and in renouncing his desire to gain possession of a woman
for whom he felt an unreasoning admiration. However, being determined
to carry out this new mood of asceticism to the end, he took Guy up to
Town with him, and tried to amuse that moody young man to the best of
his power, which was a somewhat unsatisfactory task.
Seeing that he had abandoned his scheme to gain Alizon's love, he did
not intend to speak to Mrs. Veilsturm, as he had now no desire to
entangle Guy with another woman, but as he was going to an "At Home"
given by Cleopatra, he did not hesitate to take his cousin with him in
the ordinary course of things.