of Clara that gave him the final, or mace-blow.
Jealousy invaded him.
    He had hitherto been free of it, regarding jealousy as a foreign devil, the
accursed familiar of the vulgar. Luckless fellows might be victims of the
disease; he was not; and neither Captain Oxford, nor Vernon, nor De Craye, nor
any of his compeers, had given him one shrewd pinch: the woman had, not the man;
and she in quite a different fashion from his present wallowing anguish: she had
never pulled him to earth's level, where jealousy gnaws the grasses. He had
boasted himself above the humiliating visitation.
    If that had been the case, we should not have needed to trouble ourselves
much about him. A run or two with the pack of imps would have satisfied us. But
he desired Clara Middleton manfully enough at an intimation of rivalry to be
jealous; in a minute the foreign devil had him, he was flame: flaming verdigris,
one might almost dare to say, for an exact illustration; such was actually the
colour; but accept it as unsaid.
    Remember the poets upon Jealousy. It is to be haunted in the heaven of two
by a Third; preceded or succeeded, therefore surrounded, embraced, hugged by
this infernal Third: it is Love's bed of burning marl; to see and taste the
withering Third in the bosom of sweetness; to be dragged through the past and
find the fair Eden of it sulphurous; to be dragged to the gates of the future
and glory to behold them blood: to adore the bitter creature trebly and with
treble power to clutch her by the windpipe: it is to be cheated, derided,
shamed, and abject and supplicating, and consciously demoniacal in
treacherousness, and victoriously self-justified in revenge.
    And still there is no change in what men feel, though in what they do the
modern may be judicious.
    You know the many paintings of man transformed to rageing beast by the
curse: and this, the fieriest trial of our egoism, worked in the Egoist to
produce division of himself from himself, a concentration of his thoughts upon
another object, still himself, but in another breast, which had to be looked at
and into for the discovery of him. By the gaping jaw-chasm of his greed we may
gather comprehension of his insatiate force of jealousy. Let her go? Not though
he were to become a mark of public scorn in strangling her with the yoke! His
concentration was marvellous. Unused to the exercise of imaginative powers, he
nevertheless conjured her before him visually