He had been to her what it was his duty to be.

She felt, in spite of everything, that all was at an end.

She thought, with dry sadness, that three years of her life had been given to an honest man who had loved her and whom she had loved.
"For I loved him.

I must have loved him in order to give myself to him." But she could not feel again the sentiments of early days, the movements of her mind when she had yielded.

She recalled small and insignificant circumstances: the flowers on the wall-paper and the pictures in the room.