how Clarence had turned toward her and so changed all the course of her existence; it did not explain Mr. Wyck and his muddled part in the suicide of Clarence; it did not solve that sudden, passionate interval with Richard Callendar. It was all senseless and muddled.
People might judge her as hard and cold and calculating but that, she thought, would be unjust. She had been forced to make her own way, to clear her path by the best means at hand. She had tried always to do it without harm to others. She was not, like Sabine Cane, born with all that one needed in this world. If she had been born, having those things, she might have been more happy, less lonely, less aloof. Sabine, she reflected bitterly, had everything . . . wealth and friends and happiness. Even her husband had been delivered into her hands, a man who, if chance had been less cruel, might not have been hers. She envied Sabine.
So she fell to thinking of Callendar. What might have happened if she had hurt Clarence deliberately and gone away with her lover? Callendar would have married her. She would have been rich. She would have been free. There would have been no more of this struggle.
But she could not be certain. For the first time, thinking of him now out of the detachment of her loneliness, she doubted him. He might not have married her, after all. Why should he have done it? And if he had married her he might not have been stronger than this other thing which kept driving her on, this terrible ambition that was like a disease with which one was born.
What would love have been with a man like Callendar? She trembled a little at the memory of him, grown softer now with the passing of time and more sentimental. With Clarence love had been a poor timid growth, choked and inarticulate, a thing that somehow he made shameful. Callendar was not like that. Love with him must be a great glowing passion that would overwhelm all else, even her own terrible awareness.
