When he criticised Elfrida, Janet fancied it was to hear her warm defence, which grew oddly reckless in her anxiety to hide the bitterness that tinged it.
"Otherwise," she permitted herself to reflect, "he is curiously just in his analysis of her--for a man," and hated the thought for its touch of disloyalty.
Knowing Elfrida as she thought she knew her, Kendal's talk wounded her once for herself and twice for him.

He was going on blindly, confidently, trusting, Janet thought bitterly, to his own sweetness of nature, to his comeliness and the fineness of his sympathies--who had ever refused him anything yet?
And only to his hurt, to his repulse--from the point of view of sentiment, to his ruin.

For it did not seem possible to Janet that a hopeless passion for a being like Elfrida Bell could result in anything but collapse.

Whenever he came to Kensington Square, and he came often, she went down to meet him with a quaking heart, and sought his face nervously for the haggard, broken look which should mean that he had asked Elfrida to marry him and been artistically refused.

Always she looked in vain; indeed, Kendal's spirits were so uniformly like a schoolboy's that once or twice she asked herself, with sudden terror, whether Elfrida had deceived her--whether it might not be otherwise between them, recognizing then, with infinite humiliation, how much worse that would be.