weigh them with cold cruelty at their worth, and let them drift unpitied to their doom.
Those who had loved her had been no more to her than this; beguiled for the value they were betrayed to passion that by it they might grow plastic to her purpose, bent to her command. She, who had all the superb, satiric, contemptuous disbelief in suffering of a woman of the world, still knew that, over and over again, the tide of grief had broken up vainly against the disdain of her delicate, pitiless irony; knew that over and over again a life made desolate, a life driven out to recklessness and desperation, a life laid down in the early glory of ambitious manhood, had been sacrificed through her, ruined by her, as cruelly, as carelessly as a young child destroys the brightness of the butterfly, the fragrance of the cowslip, in its sport of summer-day chase or spring-day blossom-ball. And for what? For the sake of triumphs that had palled in their gaining, for the sake of gains that were valueless now, for the sake of a sovereignty that seemed to brand her forehead with its crown, for the sake of evil things that had worn a fair mask, of freedom that had grown into slavery, of daring that had said, "Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven."
She had erred deeply; all that was noblest,
