Or quite suddenly she would find herself caught up in a whirlpool of hatred and all-encompassing spite.

Why should Louis go free while she was thus tormented? she would then ask. Could she not make him suffer, persecute him, even kill him? Why not? As man to desperate woman, his would be the disadvantage. He was spared by her scruples alone, not by her fears. It was no matter what became of her so that she could wreak herself once and for all upon him. When she dragged him out before his world that he so feared, ranted forth her mind at him, showed him like a beaten cur to his wife and his sons and his son’s wife, made the seemliness he so treasured, impossible for him forthwith, she could complete the work by killing herself. What was to prevent her? Nothing!

Nothing, save that in spite of all, she knew she was finely prompted in respecting Louis’s obduracy. Something whispered that it was not all cowardice for him to have cast her off, that beneath the maddening incidents of their parting he had taken a step which was intrinsically decent. Was not his action in harmony with the unknown forces that had long been driving her out of his world? What if the break between them had sprung from his refusal to drag her further into his own long dying?

So she took no decisive action. And the only outcome of all her stormy hours was some letters. She could not help writing letters to Louis that were by turns exalted, self-abasing, passionate, reasonable, threatening, and simply appealing.

Louis replied by one letter only.