Madox Ford and The Good Soldier

From Ford Madox Ford's The Gold Soldier:

I
suppose that my inner soul--my dual personality--had realized long before that Florence was a personality of paper--that she represented a real human being with a heart, with feelings, with sympathies and with emotions only as a bank-note represents a certain quantity of gold. I know that sort of feeling came to the
surface in me the moment the man Bagshawe told me that he had seen her coming out of that fellow's bedroom. I thought suddenly that she wasn't real; she was just a mass of talk out of guidebooks, of drawings out of fashion-plates. It is even possible that, if that feeling had not possessed me, I should have run up sooner to her
room and might have prevented her drinking the prussic acid. But I just couldn't do it; it would have been like chasing a scrap of paper--an occupation ignoble for a grown man.