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172 THE CONFESSION OF A FOOL
noble acts? While she adopted the vulgarities of her
theatrical friends, I had improved, I had acquired the
manners and language of fashionable society, I had
learned that self-control which keeps emotion in check
and is considered the hall-mark of good breeding. I had
become chaste in love, anxious to spare modesty, not to
offend against beauty and seemliness, for thus only can
we forget the brutality of an act which to my mind is
much more spiritual than physical.
I w^as rough sometimes, it is true, but never vulgar. I
killed, but never Avounded. I called a spade a spade, but
never hinted and insinuated ; my ideas were my own,
prompted by the situations in which I happened to find
myself ; I never tried to dazzle A^ith the witticisms of
musical comedies or comic papers.
I loved cleanliness, purity, beauty in my daily surround-
ings ; I preferred to refuse an invitation to accepting it
and appearing badly dressed. I never received her in
dressing-gown and slippers ; I may not always have been
able to offer a guest more than bread and butter and a
glass of beer, but there was always a clean table-cloth.
I had not set her a bad example ; it was not my fault
that she had deteriorated. Her love for me was dead,
therefore she did not want to please me any longer. She
belonged to the public, it was that fact which had made
her the wanton who could calmly present her bill for so
many nights of pleasure. . . .
During the next few days I shut myself up in my
library. I mourned for my love, my splendid, foolish,
divine love. All was over, and the battlefield on Avhich
the struggle had raged was silent and still. Two dead
and so many wounded to satisfy a woman who was not
worth a pair of old shoes ! If her passion had at least
been roused by the longing for motherhood, if she had
been guided by the unrealised instincts which force those
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