It was killed in a flash.
After all those years.
I can't think of her now without horror.
What destroys me, what makes me so frightfully unhappy is to think of her unspeakable degradation.'
So it has been said that it was not jealousy that caused Othello to kill Desdemona, but an agony that the creature that he believed angelic should be proved impure and worthless.
What broke his noble heart was that virtue should so fall.
'I thought there was no one like her.
I admired her so much.
I admired her courage and her frankness, her intelligence and her love of beauty.
She's just a sham and she's never been anything else.'
'I wonder if that's true.
Do you think any of us are all of a piece?
Do you know what strikes me?
I should have said that Albert was only the instrument, her toll to the solid earth, so to speak; that left her soul at liberty to range the empyrean.
Perhaps the mere fact that he was so far below her gave her a sense of freedom in her relations with him that she would have lacked with a man of her own class.
The spirit is very strange, it never soars so high as when the body has wallowed for a period in the gutter.'
'Oh, don't talk such rot,' he answered angrily.
'I don't think it is rot.
I don't put it very well, but the idea's sound.'
'Much good it does me.
I'm broken and done for.
I'm finished.'
'Oh, nonsense.
Why don't you write a story about it?'
'I?'
'You know, that's the great pull a writer has over other people.
When something has made him terribly unhappy, and he's tortured and miserable, he can put it all into a story and it's astonishing what a comfort and relief it is.'
'It would be monstrous.
Betty was everything in the world to me.
I couldn't do anything so caddish.'
He paused for a little and I saw him reflect.
I saw that notwithstanding the horror that my suggestion caused him he did for one minute look at the situation from the standpoint of the writer.
He shook his head.
'Not for her sake, for mine.
After all I have some self-respect.
Besides, there's no story there.'