Madame de Cintre was irretrievably lost; and yet, as he would have said himself, he didn’t see his way clear to giving her up.  He found it impossible to turn his back upon Fleurieres and its inhabitants; it seemed to him that some germ of hope or reparation must lurk there somewhere, if he could only stretch his arm out far enough to pluck it.  It was as if he had his hand on a door-knob and were closing his clenched fist upon it:  he had thumped, he had called, he had pressed the door with his powerful knee and shaken it with all his strength, and dead, damning silence had answered him.  And yet something held him there—­something hardened the grasp of his fingers.  Newman’s satisfaction had been too intense, his whole plan too deliberate and mature, his prospect of happiness too rich and comprehensive for this fine moral fabric to crumble at a stroke.  The very foundation seemed fatally injured, and yet he felt a stubborn desire still to try to save the edifice.  He was filled with a sorer sense of wrong than he had ever known, or than he had supposed it possible he should know.  To accept his injury and walk away without looking behind him was a stretch of good-nature of which he found himself incapable.  He looked behind him intently and continually, and what he saw there did not assuage his resentment.  He saw himself trustful, generous, liberal, patient, easy, pocketing frequent irritation and furnishing unlimited modesty.  To have eaten humble pie, to have been snubbed and patronized and satirized and have consented to take it as one of the conditions of the bargain—­to have done this, and done it all for nothing, surely gave one a right to protest.  And to be turned off because one was a commercial person!  As if he had ever talked or dreamt of the commercial since his connection with the Bellegardes began—­as if he had made the least circumstance of the commercial—­as if he would not have consented to confound the commercial fifty times a day, if it might have increased by a hair’s breadth the chance of the Bellegardes’ not playing him a trick!  Granted that being commercial was fair ground for having a trick played upon one, how little they knew about the class so designed and its enterprising way of not standing upon trifles!  It was in the light of his injury that the weight of Newman’s past endurance seemed so heavy; his actual irritation had not been so great, merged as it was in his vision of the cloudless blue that overarched his immediate wooing.  But now his sense of outrage was deep, rancorous, and ever present; he felt that he was a good fellow wronged.  As for Madame de Cintre’s conduct, it struck him with a kind of awe, and the fact that he was powerless to understand it or feel the reality of its motives only deepened the force with which he had attached himself to her.  He had never let the fact of her Catholicism trouble him; Catholicism to him was nothing but a name, and to express a mistrust of the form in which her religious