The ideal girl, all purity, gentleness, and truth, whom he had loved and married, had, it appeared, never really existed after all.

He shrank from the idea of the angry, vehement words and foul calumnies.

He shrank from the woman who had forgotten every rule of good breeding, every trace of good manners, in angry, fierce passion.
How was he ever to face Miss Charteris again?
She would never mention one word of what had happened, but he could ill brook the shame Dora had brought upon him.

He remembered the summer morning in the woods when he told Valentine the story of his love, and had pictured his pretty, artless Dora to her.

Could the angry woman who had dared to insult him, and to calumniate the fairest and truest lady in all England, possibly be the same?
Ronald had never before been brought into close contact with dishonor.
He had some faint recollection at college of having seen and known a young man, the son of a wealthy nobleman, scorned and despised, driven from all society, and he was told that it was because he had been detected in the act of listening at the principal's door.