Nothing could exceed the executioner-like promptitude with which a woman will despatch a man for whom she has ceased to care.

But in her case there is to be urged that, though fundamentally love is of equal importance to man and woman, it does not so often mean the absolute saving or wrecking of a man's life as it does a woman's.

It is not a disgrace to a man to be jilted; it is to a woman.

For a woman to be jilted is for her to have failed,--as a woman; and for a woman to have failed as a woman is for her to value no other success.
All this to maintain, in spite of the reader, that Londonderry is no milksop because he is not going to jilt--that is, murder--poor little Jenny, throw up New Zion, and seek his new love on the wild winds.

But the agony of it none the less! O Jenny! Jenny! sweet and true and good and dear as ever,--if only you would just take a sudden fancy for someone else! Meanwhile the months were going by, and the day drawing nearer when, for a brief moment of fire, the orbits of those two separated lives were to touch once more.
What of Isabel during these months?
The woman whom God had created for Theophilus Londonderry did not forget her promise to write to the woman whom Theophilus Londonderry had created in his own image.