That the change seemed so considerable proved how great a
figure he had become in men's eyes no less than how utterly his career
was overthrown. The comments on his public life were very flattering, but
already they praised in the tone of an obituary notice, and the hopes
they expressed of his being able some day to return to the arena were
well understood to be no more than a kind or polite refusal to display
naked truth in the merciless clearness of print.
Here was the state of things which extorted from Morewood the blunt wish
that Quisante might die. Such a desire was hardly cruel to the man
himself, since he must now lose all that he had loved best in the market
of the world; but it was not the man himself who had been most in
Morewood's thoughts. With a penetration sharpened by the memory of his
blunder he had appreciated the perverse calamity which had fallen on the
man's wife, and had passed swiftly to the conclusion that for her an end
by death was the only chance, the only turn of events which could give
back to her the chance of a real life to be lived.
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