How Lady Hayman and all her tribe, a tribe which once had petted and entertained the beautiful Mrs. Chepstow, had dubbed her "Bella Donna," how they must be rejoicing to-day! She could almost hear what they were saying as she sat in the sunset by the Nile. "What a mercy that woman has overreached herself!" "How furious she must, be, now Harwich has got sons!" "What a delicious slap in the face for her after catching that foolish Nigel Armine!" Hundreds of women were smiling over her discomfiture at this moment, and probably also hundreds of men. For no one would give her credit for having married Nigel for himself, for having honestly fallen in love with him and acted "squarely" towards him. And, of course, she had not fallen in love with him. He was not, indeed, the type of man with whom a nature and a temperament like hers could fall in love. She had liked him before she married him, he had even had for her a certain physical attraction; but already that physical attraction--really the passing fancy of a capricious and a too-experienced woman--had lost its savour, and for a reason that, had he known it, would have cut Nigel to the heart.
She could not bear his love of an ideal, his instinct to search for hidden good in men and women, but especially in herself, his secret desire for moral progress. She knew that these traits existed in him, and therefore was able to hate them; but she was incapable of really understanding them, clever woman though she was. Her cleverness was of that type which comprehends vice more completely than virtue, and although she could apprehend virtue, as she had proved by her conduct in London which had led to her capture of Nigel, she could never learn really to understand its loveliness, or to bask happily in its warmth and light. Morally she seemed to be impotent. And the great gulf which must for ever divide her husband from her was his absolute disbelief that any human being can be morally impotent. He must for ever misunderstand her, because his power to read character was less acute than his power to love. And she, in her inmost chamber of the soul, though she might play a part to deceive, though she might seldom be, however often appearing to be, truly her natural self, had the desire, active surely or latent in the souls of all human creatures, to be understood, to be known as she actually was.
Nigel had been aware that Zoe Harwich was going to have a child, and he had never let her know it.