“It was about that time (Merrick went on after a long pause) that I definitely not to sell the Works, but to stick to my job and conform my life to it.  
“I can’t describe to you the rage of that me. Poetry, ideas—all the picture-making processes stopped. A kind of dull self-discipline seemed to me the only exercise of a reflecting mind. I had to my great refusal, and I tried to do it by myself up to the eyes into the very conditions I had been struggling to get away from. The only possible would have been to find in a life of business routine and social such moral compensations as may reward the citizen if they fail the man; but to to these I should have had to accept the old that the social and the individual man are two. Now, on the contrary, I found soon enough that I couldn’t get one part of my to work effectively while another wanted feeding: and that in rejecting what had seemed to me a of action I had made all my action negative.
 
“The best solution, of course, would have been to fall in love with another woman; but it was long before I could bring myself to wish that this might happen to me.... Then, at length, I suddenly and violently desired it; and as such impulses are seldom without some kind of imperfect issue I , a year or two later, to work myself up into the wished-for state.... She was a woman in society, and with all the of that institution that Paulina lacked. Our relation was consequently one of those unavowed affairs in which triviality is the only alternative to tragedy. Luckily we had, on both sides, risked only as much as people stake in a drawingroom game; and when the match was over I take it that we came out fairly even.
 
“My gain, at all events, was of an unexpected kind. The adventure had served only to make me understand Paulina’s of such experiments, and at every turn of the slight I had felt how and such a relation was bound to be between two people who, had they been free, would have mated openly. And so from a brief phase of imperfect forgetting I was driven back to a deeper and more understanding remembrance....
 
“This second incarnation of Paulina was one of the strangest episodes of the whole strange experience. Things she had said during our extraordinary talk, things I had hardly heard at the time, came back to me with singular vividness and a fuller meaning. I hadn’t any longer the cold consolation of believing in my own : I saw that her insight had been deeper and keener than mine.
 
“I remember, in particular, starting up in bed one night as there flashed into my head the meaning of her last words: ‘There was no other way’; the phrase I had half-smiled at at the time, as a parrot-like echo of the novel-heroine’s stock farewell. I had never, up to that moment, wholly understood why Paulina had come to my house that night. I had never been able to make that particular act—which could hardly, in the light of her subsequent conduct, be dismissed as a blind surge of passion—square with my conception of her character. She was at once the most spontaneous and the steadiest-minded woman I had ever known, and the last to wish to owe any advantage to surprise, to unpreparedness, to any play on the............