This challenge would have been provoking to any man under any circumstances, but I had special reasons for rising to it as I did. Thomas Hardy, she had written, belonged to that class of men who are ungenerous with their affections and timid in their caresses and niggardly with their seed. They seem to promise everything but part with nothing. And they cause great circles of black unhappiness to appear around the eyes of the women they undermine. It was these words of Camilla’s that had brought me down here. I wanted to hear more of them, too. Only I wanted to hear them from a position of unquestioned strength. I sought confirmation of what I wasn’t and never had been and stood in no danger of ever being. And I was anxious to refute that charge of moral gaucherie that hung over me also, that accusation that I no more knew how to hold on to what was rightly mine than Michael Henchard, one time Mayor of Casterbridge. So I was rich and giving with my affections, and I was expansive – you’ve never seen such expansion – with my caresses, and I was prodigal – I positively threw it around – of my seed. I promised everything and I gave much more. I drove it home, too, that I knew the difference between giving and giving away. And since I was driving I didn’t rest until I had driven every line of care and hopelessness from Camilla’s face.

But she still seemed relieved to have it over with. ‘Good,’ she said, without putting any adjectival fervour into the word, ‘now what would you like for breakfast?’ She pulled her shirt back over her head just as impersonally as she had originally pulled it off.