The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope

It is hoped that the reader need hardly be informed that Hetta Carbury was a very miserable young woman as soon as she decided that duty compelled her to divide herself altogether from Paul Montague. I think that she was irrational; but to her it seemed that the offence against herself -- the offence against her own dignity as a woman -- was too great to be forgiven. There can be no doubt that it would all have been forgiven with the greatest ease had Paul told the story before it had reached her ears from any other source.

Had he said to her -- when her heart was softest towards him -- I once loved another woman, and that woman is here now in London, a trouble to me, persecuting me, and her history is so-and-so, and the history of my love for her was after this fashion, and the history of my declining love is after that fashion, and of this at any rate you may be sure, that this woman has never been near my heart from the first moment in which I saw you; -- had he told it to her thus, there would not have been an opening for anger. And he doubtless would have so told it, had not Hetta's brother interfered too quickly. He was then forced to exculpate himself, to confess rather than to tell his own story -- and to admit facts which wore the air of having been concealed, and which had already been conceived to be altogether damning if true.