No longer the inspirer, she was yet, she bitterly told herself, honoured among women as a critic.

Her heart might bleed, and her eyes fill with tears, as he read; but then, as he would say, the Beauty, the Music! Is it Beautiful?
Is it Music?
If it be that, no matter how it has been made! Let us give thanks for creation, though it involves the sacrifice of our own most tender and sacred feelings.

To set mere personal feelings against Beauty--human tears against an immortal creation! Did he spare his own feelings?
Indeed he did not.
On the night when we first met him bidding good-bye to Silencieux "until the rising of the moon," he had sat through dinner eating but little, feverishly and somewhat cruelly gay.

Though he was as yet too kind to admit it to himself, Beatrice was beginning to bore him, not merely by her sadness, which his absorption prevented his realising except in flashes, but by her very resemblance to the Image--of which, from having been the beloved original, she was, in his eyes, becoming an indifferent materialisation.

The sweet flesh he had loved so tenderly became an offence to him, as a medium too gross for the embodiment of so beautiful a face.