He had taken a ten-pound note out of his pocket-book, and he pushed it into Tishy's strong and supple white hand.
Great pain paralyses the mind, as the torture of a limb makes the limb faint and helpless. When the heart-pain can be dealt with as a separate thing, it is no longer supreme.
This was the difference between Christian and Larry. Her love was herself, indivisible, a condition of her being. When it ceased, it would mean that the creature that called herself Christian Talbot-Lowry had ceased also. During the long, bright morning, after Larry and Dr. Mangan had departed together, she felt that this had happened; that the part of her that knew and suffered had gone away, or was lying dead in her. There was a weight in her breast, she could feel it, but she scarcely felt pain, only a great bewilderment, an incredulity that this thing, of whose reality her mind told her, but without conviction, should have happened to her, just precisely to her, out of all the people in the world. People have felt this when that iron shutter that is called Death has fallen between them and that one who was their share of the world. A part of them, some plausible imitation of them, can speak and act, and be extolled, perhaps, for facing the music stoutly; while the stricken thing that is themselves, is lying prone before the iron shutter; beating on it with broken hands, calling, and hearing no answer.
It was nearly a month now since Dick Talbot-Lowry had asserted his paternal rights, and had, following various classic and biblical precedents, sacrificed his daughter to his own particular formulæ of religion and politics. He would never know that it had been the appeal that weakness makes to strength that had given him his victory. When he spoke to Lady Isabel of his scene with Larry, he told her that he had nipped the thing in the bud. The damned puppy of a fellow took for granted that Christian was in love with him; but here she was, going about as usual, as jolly as a sandboy; "in fact," Dick would say, plastering up with bromidic mortar the windows of the narrow dwelling wherein dwelt Lady Isabel's soul, "all's well that ends well!" With which valuable aphorism, sanctioned by a long and respectable past, the Major contentedly fed his heart, and tranquillised that of his wife.