 would have said
himself, he didn't see his way clear to giving her up. He found it impossible to
turn his back upon Fleurières and its inhabitants; it seemed to him that some
germ of hope or reparation must lurk there somewhere, if he could only stretch
his arm out far enough to pluck it. It was as if he had his hand on a door-knob
and were closing his clenched fist upon it: he had thumped, he had called, he
had pressed the door with his powerful knee, and shaken it with all his
strength, and dead damning silence had answered him. And yet something held him
there - something hardened the grasp of his fingers. Newman's satisfaction had
been too intense, his whole plan too deliberate and mature, his prospect of
happiness too rich and comprehensive, for this fine moral fabric to crumble at a
stroke. The very foundation seemed fatally injured, and yet he felt a stubborn
desire still to try to save the edifice. He was filled with a sorer sense of
wrong than he had ever known, or than he had supposed it possible he should
know. To accept his injury and walk away without looking behind him was a
stretch of good-nature of which he found himself incapable. He looked behind him
intently and continually, and what he saw there did not assuage his resentment.
He saw himself trustful, generous, liberal, patient, easy, pocketing frequent
irritation and furnishing unlimited modesty. To have eaten humble pie, to have
been snubbed and patronised and satirised, and have consented to take it as one
of the conditions of the bargain - to have done this, and done it all for
nothing, surely gave one a right to protest. And to be turned off because one
was a commercial person! As if he had ever talked or dreamt of the commercial
since his connection with the Bellegardes began - as if he had made the least
circumstance of the commercial - as if he would not have consented to confound
the commercial fifty times a day, if it might have increased by a hair's breadth
the chance of the Bellegardes' not playing him a trick! Granted that being
commercial was fair ground for having a trick played upon one, how little they
knew about the class so designated and its enterprising way of not standing upon
trifles! It was in the light of his injury that the weight of Newman's past
endurance seemed so heavy; his actual irritation had not been so great, merged
as it was in his vision of the cloudless blue that overarched his immediate
wooing. But now his sense
