"when i tried to rid her soul of this gloomy fallacy, she suffered so terribly that my heart will never be quite at peace so long as i can remember that dreadful time! do you know why she left me? simply to prove to me what is not true that she is base. but the worst of it is, she did not realize herself that that was all she wanted to prove by her departure! she went away in response to some inner prompting to do something disgraceful, in order that she might say to herself ‘there you’ve done a new act of shame you degraded creature!’