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Title:  The Good Soldier

Author:  Ford Madox Ford 

August, 2001  [Etext #2775]
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The Good Soldier

by Ford Madox Ford




PART I



I


THIS is the saddest story I have ever heard. We had known the
Ashburnhams  for nine seasons of the town of Nauheim with an
extreme intimacy--or, rather  with an acquaintanceship as loose
and easy and yet as close as a good  glove's with your hand. My
wife and I knew Captain and Mrs Ashburnham as  well as it was
possible to know anybody, and yet, in another sense, we knew 
nothing at all about them. This is, I believe, a state of things only 
possible with English people of whom, till today, when I sit down
to puzzle  out what I know of this sad affair, I knew nothing
whatever. Six months ago  I had never been to England, and,
certainly, I had never sounded the depths  of an English heart. I
had known the shallows.

I don't mean to say that we were not acquainted with many English
people.  Living, as we perforce lived, in Europe, and being, as we
perforce were,  leisured Americans, which is as much as to say that
we were un-American, we  were thrown very much into the society
of the nicer English. Paris, you see,  was our home. Somewhere
between Nice and Bordighera provided yearly winter  quarters for
us, and Nauheim always received us from July to September. You 
will gather from this statement that one of us had, as the saying is,
a  "heart", and, from the statement that my wife is dead, that she
was the  sufferer.

Captain Ashburnham also had a heart. But, whereas a yearly
month or so at  Nauheim tuned him up to exactly the right pitch for
the rest of the  twelvemonth, the two months or so were only just
enough to keep poor  Florence alive from year to year. The reason
for his heart was,  approximately, polo, or too much hard
sportsmanship in his youth. The reason  for poor Florence's broken
years was a storm at sea upon our first crossing  to Europe, and the
immediate reasons for our imprisonment in that continent  were
doctor's orders. They said that even the short Channel crossing
might  well kill the poor thing.

When we all first met, Captain Ashburnham, home on sick leave
from an India  to which he was never to return, was thirty-three;
Mrs Ashburnham  Leonora --was thirty-one. I was thirty-six and
poor Florence thirty. Thus today Florence would have been
thirty-nine and Captain  Ashburnham forty-two; whereas I am
forty-five and Leonora forty. You will  perceive, therefore, that our
friendship has been a young-middle-aged  affair, since we were all
of us of quite quiet dispositions, the Ashburnhams  being more
particularly what in England it is the custom to call "quite good 
people".

They were descended, as you will probably expect, from the
Ashburnham who  accompanied Charles I to the scaffold, and, as
you must also expect with  this class of English people, you would
never have noticed it. Mrs  Ashburnham was a Powys; Florence
was a Hurlbird of Stamford, Connecticut,  where, as you know,
they are more old-fashioned than even the inhabitants of  Cranford,
England, could have been. I myself am a Dowell of Philadelphia, 
Pa., where, it is historically true, there are more old English
families  than you would find in any six English counties taken
together. I carry  about with me, indeed--as if it were the only thing
that invisibly anchored  me to any spot upon the globe--the title
deeds of my farm, which once  covered several blocks between
Chestnut and Walnut Streets. These title  deeds are of wampum,
the grant of an Indian chief to the first Dowell, who  left Farnham
in Surrey in company with William Penn. Florence's people, as  is
so often the case with the inhabitants of Connecticut, came from
the  neighbourhood of Fordingbridge, where the Ashburnhams'
place is. From there,  at this moment, I am actually writing.

You may well ask why I write. And yet my reasons are quite many.
For it is  not unusual in human beings who have witnessed the sack
of a city or the  falling to pieces of a people to desire to set down
what they have witnessed  for the benefit of unknown heirs or of
generations infinitely remote; or, if  you please, just to get the sight
out of their heads.

Some one has said that the death of a mouse from cancer is the
whole sack of  Rome by the Goths, and I swear to you that the
breaking up of our little  four-square coterie was such another
unthinkable event. Supposing that you  should come upon us
sitting together at one of the little tables in front of  the club house,
let us say, at Homburg, taking tea of an afternoon and  watching
the miniature golf, you would have said that, as human affairs go, 
we were an extraordinarily safe castle. We were, if you will, one of
those  tall ships with the white sails upon a blue sea, one of those
things that  seem the proudest and the safest of all the beautiful
and safe things that  God has permitted the mind of men to frame.
Where better could one take  refuge? Where better?

Permanence? Stability? I can't believe it's gone. I can't believe that
that  long, tranquil life, which was just stepping a minuet, vanished
in four  crashing days at the end of nine years and six weeks. Upon
my word, yes, our  intimacy was like a minuet, simply because on
every possible occasion and in  every possible circumstance we
knew where to go, where to sit, which table  we unanimously
should choose; and we could rise and go, all four together, 
without a signal from any one of us, always to the music of the Kur 
orchestra, always in the temperate sunshine, or, if it rained, in
discreet  shelters. No, indeed, it can't be gone. You can't kill a
minuet de la cour.  You may shut up the music-book, close the
harpsichord; in the cupboard and  presses the rats may destroy the
white satin favours. The mob may sack  Versailles; the Trianon
may fall, but surely the minuet--the minuet itself  is dancing itself
away into the furthest stars, even as our minuet of the  Hessian
bathing places must be stepping itself still. Isn't there any heaven 
where old beautiful dances, old beautiful intimacies prolong
themselves?  Isn't there any Nirvana pervaded by the faint thrilling
of instruments that  have fallen into the dust of wormwood but that
yet had frail, tremulous, and  everlasting souls?

No, by God, it is false! It wasn't a minuet that we stepped; it was a 
prison--a prison full of screaming hysterics, tied down so that they
might  not outsound the rolling of our carriage wheels as we went
along the shaded  avenues of the Taunus Wald.

And yet I swear by the sacred name of my creator that it was true.
It was  true sunshine; the true music; the true splash of the
fountains from the  mouth of stone dolphins. For, if for me we
were four people with the same  tastes, with the same desires,
acting--or, no, not acting--sitting here and  there unanimously, isn't
that the truth? If for nine years I have possessed  a goodly apple
that is rotten at the core and discover its rottenness only  in nine
years and six months less four days, isn't it true to say that for  nine
years I possessed a goodly apple? So it may well be with Edward 
Ashburnham, with Leonora his wife and with poor dear Florence.
And, if you  come to think of it, isn't it a little odd that the physical
rottenness of  at least two pillars of our four-square house never
presented itself to my  mind as a menace to its security? It doesn't
so present itself now though  the two of them are actually dead. I
don't know. . . .

I know nothing--nothing in the world--of the hearts of men. I only
know that  I am alone--horribly alone. No hearthstone will ever
again witness, for me,  friendly intercourse. No smoking-room will
ever be other than peopled with  incalculable simulacra amidst
smoke wreaths. Yet, in the name of God, what  should I know if I
don't know the life of the hearth and of the  smoking-room, since
my whole life has been passed in those places? The warm 
hearthside! --Well, there was Florence: I believe that for the twelve
years  her life lasted, after the storm that seemed irretrievably to
have weakened  her heart--I don't believe that for one minute she
was out of my sight,  except when she was safely tucked up in bed
and I should be downstairs,  talking to some good fellow or other
in some lounge or smoking-room or  taking my final turn with a
cigar before going to bed. I don't, you  understand, blame Florence.
But how can she have known what she knew? How  could she have
got to know it? To know it so fully. Heavens! There doesn't  seem
to have been the actual time. It must have been when I was taking
my  baths, and my Swedish exercises, being manicured. Leading
the life I did, of  the sedulous, strained nurse, I had to do
something to keep myself fit. It  must have been then! Yet even
that can't have been enough time to get the  tremendously long
conversations full of worldly wisdom that Leonora has  reported to
me since their deaths. And is it possible to imagine that during  our
prescribed walks in Nauheim and the neighbourhood she found
time to  carry on the protracted negotiations which she did carry on
between Edward  Ashburnham and his wife? And isn't it incredible
that during all that time  Edward and Leonora never spoke a word
to each other in private? What is one  to think of humanity?

For I swear to you that they were the model couple. He was as
devoted as it  was possible to be without appearing fatuous. So
well set up, with such  honest blue eyes, such a touch of stupidity,
such a warm goodheartedness!  And she--so tall, so splendid in the
saddle, so fair! Yes, Leonora was  extraordinarily fair and so
extraordinarily the real thing that she seemed  too good to be true.
You don't, I mean, as a rule, get it all so  superlatively together. To
be the county family, to look the county family,  to be so
appropriately and perfectly wealthy; to be so perfect in 
manner--even just to the saving touch of insolence that seems to be 
necessary. To have all that and to be all that! No, it was too good
to be  true. And yet, only this afternoon, talking over the whole
matter she said  to me: "Once I tried to have a lover but I was so
sick at the heart, so  utterly worn out that I had to send him away."
That struck me as the most  amazing thing I had ever heard. She
said "I was actually in a man's arms.  Such a nice chap! Such a
dear fellow! And I was saying to myself, fiercely,  hissing it
between my teeth, as they say in novels--and really clenching 
them together: I was saying to myself: 'Now, I'm in for it and I'll
really  have a good time for once in my life--for once in my life!' It
was in the  dark, in a carriage, coming back from a hunt ball.
Eleven miles we had to  drive! And then suddenly the bitterness of
the endless poverty, of the  endless acting--it fell on me like a
blight, it spoilt everything. Yes, I  had to realize that I had been
spoilt even for the good time when it came.  And I burst out crying
and I cried and I cried for the whole eleven miles.  Just imagine
me crying! And just imagine me making a fool of the poor dear 
chap like that. It certainly wasn't playing the game, was it now?"

I don't know; I don't know; was that last remark of hers the remark
of a  harlot, or is it what every decent woman, county family or not
county  family, thinks at the bottom of her heart? Or thinks all the
time for the  matter of that? Who knows?

Yet, if one doesn't know that at this hour and day, at this pitch of 
civilization to which we have attained, after all the preachings of
all the  moralists, and all the teachings of all the mothers to all the
daughters in  saecula saeculorum . . . but perhaps that is what all
mothers teach all  daughters, not with lips but with the eyes, or
with heart whispering to  heart. And, if one doesn't know as much
as that about the first thing in the  world, what does one know and
why is one here?

I asked Mrs Ashburnham whether she had told Florence that and
what Florence  had said and she answered:--"Florence didn't offer
any comment at all. What  could she say? There wasn't anything to
be said. With the grinding poverty  we had to put up with to keep
up appearances, and the way the poverty came  about--you know
what I mean--any woman would have been justified in taking a 
lover and presents too. Florence once said about a very similar 
position--she was a little too well-bred, too American, to talk about 
mine--that it was a case of perfectly open riding and the woman
could just  act on the spur of the moment. She said it in American
of course, but that  was the sense of it. I think her actual words
were: 'That it was up to her  to take it or leave it. . . .'"

I don't want you to think that I am writing Teddy Ashburnham
down a brute. I  don't believe he was. God knows, perhaps all men
are like that. For as I've  said what do I know even of the
smoking-room? Fellows come in and tell the  most extraordinarily
gross stories--so gross that they will positively give  you a pain.
And yet they'd be offended if you suggested that they weren't  the
sort of person you could trust your wife alone with. And very
likely  they'd be quite properly offended--that is if you can trust
anybody alone  with anybody. But that sort of fellow obviously
takes more delight in  listening to or in telling gross stories--more
delight than in anything else  in the world. They'll hunt languidly
and dress languidly and dine languidly  and work without
enthusiasm and find it a bore to carry on three minutes' 
conversation about anything whatever and yet, when the other sort
of  conversation begins, they'll laugh. and wake up and throw
themselves about  in their chairs. Then, if they so delight in the
narration, how is it  possible that they can be offended--and
properly offended--at the suggestion  that they might make
attempts upon your wife's honour? Or again: Edward  Ashburnham
was the cleanest looking sort of chap;--an excellent magistrate,  a
first rate soldier, one of the best landlords, so they said, in
Hampshire,  England. To the poor and to hopeless drunkards, as I
myself have witnessed,  he was like a painstaking guardian. And
he never told a story that couldn't  have gone into the columns of
the Field more than once or twice in all the  nine years of my
knowing him. He didn't even like hearing them; he would  fidget
and get up and go out to buy a cigar or something of that sort. You 
would have said that he was just exactly the sort of chap that you
could  have trusted your wife with. And I trusted mine and it was
madness.  And yet again you have me. If poor Edward was
dangerous because of the  chastity of his expressions--and they say
that is always the hall-mark of a  libertine--what about myself? For
I solemnly avow that not only have I never  so much as hinted at
an impropriety in my conversation in the whole of my  days; and
more than that, I will vouch for the cleanness of my thoughts and 
the absolute chastity of my life. At what, then, does it all work out?
Is  the whole thing a folly and a mockery? Am I no better than a
eunuch or is  the proper man--the man with the right to
existence--a raging stallion  forever neighing after his neighbour's
womankind?

I don't know. And there is nothing to guide us. And if everything is
so  nebulous about a matter so elementary as the morals of sex,
what is there to  guide us in the more subtle morality of all other
personal contacts,  associations, and activities? Or are we meant to
act on impulse alone? It is  all a darkness.

II 

I DON'T know how it is best to put this thing down--whether it
would be  better to try and tell the story from the beginning, as if it
were a story;  or whether to tell it from this distance of time, as it
reached me from the  lips of Leonora or from those of Edward
himself.

So I shall just imagine myself for a fortnight or so at one side of
the  fireplace of a country cottage, with a sympathetic soul
opposite me. And I  shall go on talking, in a low voice while the
sea sounds in the distance and  overhead the great black flood of
wind polishes the bright stars. From time  to time we shall get up
and go to the door and look out at the great moon  and say: "Why,
it is nearly as bright as in Provence!" And then we shall  come
back to the fireside, with just the touch of a sigh because we are
not  in that Provence where even the saddest stories are gay.
Consider the  lamentable history of Peire Vidal. Two years ago
Florence and I motored from  Biarritz to Las Tours, which is in the
Black Mountains. In the middle of a  tortuous valley there rises up
an immense pinnacle and on the pinnacle are  four castles--Las
Tours, the Towers. And the immense mistral blew down that 
valley which was the way from France into Provence so that the
silver grey  olive leaves appeared like hair flying in the wind, and
the tufts of  rosemary crept into the iron rocks that they might not
be torn up by the  roots.

It was, of course, poor dear Florence who wanted to go to Las
Tours. You are  to imagine that, however much her bright
personality came from Stamford,  Connecticut, she was yet a
graduate of Poughkeepsie. I never could imagine  how she did
it--the queer, chattery person that she was. With the far-away  look
in her eyes--which wasn't, however, in the least romantic--I mean
that  she didn't look as if she were seeing poetic dreams, or looking
through you,  for she hardly ever did look at you!--holding up one
hand as if she wished  to silence any objection--or any comment
for the matter of that--she would  talk. She would talk about
William the Silent, about Gustave the Loquacious,  about Paris
frocks, about how the poor dressed in 1337, about Fantin-Latour, 
about the Paris-Lyons-Mediterrane train-deluxe, about whether it
would be  worth while to get off at Tarascon and go across the
windswept  suspension-bridge, over the Rhone to take another look
at Beaucaire.

We never did take another look at Beaucaire, of course--beautiful
Beaucaire,  with the high, triangular white tower, that looked as
thin as a needle and  as tall as the Flatiron, between Fifth and
Broadway--Beaucaire with the grey  walls on the top of the
pinnacle surrounding an acre and a half of blue  irises, beneath the
tallness of the stone pines, What a beautiful thing the  stone pine
is! . . .

No, we never did go back anywhere. Not to Heidelberg, not to
Hamelin, not to  Verona, not to Mont Majour--not so much as to
Carcassonne itself. We talked  of it, of course, but I guess Florence
got all she wanted out of one look at  a place. She had the seeing
eye.

I haven't, unfortunately, so that the world is full of places to which
I  want to return--towns with the blinding white sun upon them;
stone pines  against the blue of the sky; corners of gables, all
carved and painted with  stags and scarlet flowers and crowstepped
gables with the little saint at  the top; and grey and pink palazzi
and walled towns a mile or so back from  the sea, on the
Mediterranean, between Leghorn and Naples. Not one of them  did
we see more than once, so that the whole world for me is like spots
of  colour in an immense canvas. Perhaps if it weren't so I should
have  something to catch hold of now.

Is all this digression or isn't it digression? Again I don't know. You,
the  listener, sit opposite me. But you are so silent. You don't tell
me  anything. I am, at any rate, trying to get you to see what sort of
life it  was I led with Florence and what Florence was like. Well,
she was bright;  and she danced. She seemed to dance over the
floors of castles and over seas  and over and over and over the
salons of modistes and over the plages of the  Riviera--like a gay
tremulous beam, reflected from water upon a ceiling. And  my
function in life was to keep that bright thing in existence. And it
was  almost as difficult as trying to catch with your hand that
dancing  reflection. And the task lasted for years.

Florence's aunts used to say that I must be the laziest man in
Philadelphia.  They had never been to Philadelphia and they had
the New England conscience.  You see, the first thing they said to
me when I called in on Florence in the  little ancient, colonial,
wooden house beneath the high, thin-leaved  elms--the first
question they asked me was not how I did but what did I do.  And I
did nothing. I suppose I ought to have done something, but I didn't 
see any call to do it. Why does one do things? I just drifted in and
wanted  Florence. First I had drifted in on Florence at a Browning
tea, or something  of the sort in Fourteenth Street, which was then
still residential. I don't  know why I had gone to New York; I don't
know why I had gone to the tea. I  don't see why Florence should
have gone to that sort of spelling bee. It  wasn't the place at which,
even then, you expected to find a Poughkeepsie  graduate. I guess
Florence wanted to raise the culture of the Stuyvesant  crowd and
did it as she might have gone in slumming. Intellectual slumming, 
that was what it was. She always wanted to leave the world a little
more  elevated than she found it. Poor dear thing, I have heard her
lecture Teddy  Ashburnham by the hour on the difference between
a Franz Hals and a  Wouvermans and why the Pre-Mycenaean
statues were cubical with knobs on the  top. I wonder what he
made of it? Perhaps he was thankful.

I know I was. For do you understand my whole attentions, my
whole endeavours  were to keep poor dear Florence on to topics
like the finds at Cnossos and  the mental spirituality of Walter
Pater. I had to keep her at it, you  understand, or she might die. For
I was solemnly informed that if she became  excited over anything
or if her emotions were really stirred her little  heart might cease to
beat. For twelve years I had to watch every word that  any person
uttered in any conversation and I had to head it off what the 
English call "things"--off love, poverty, crime, religion and the rest
of  it. Yes, the first doctor that we had when she was carried off
the ship at  Havre assured me that this must be done. Good God,
are all these fellows  monstrous idiots, or is there a freemasonry
between all of them from end to  end of the earth? . . . That is what
makes me think of that fellow Peire  Vidal.

Because, of course, his story is culture and I had to head her
towards  culture and at the same time it's so funny and she hadn't
got to laugh, and  it's so full of love and she wasn't to think of love.
Do you know the story?  Las Tours of the Four Castles had for
chatelaine Blanche Somebody-or-other  who was called as a term
of commendation, La Louve--the She-Wolf. And Peire  Vidal the
Troubadour paid his court to La Louve. And she wouldn't have 
anything to do with him. So, out of compliment to her--the things
people do  when they're in love!--he dressed himself up in
wolfskins and went up into  the Black Mountains. And the
shepherds of the Montagne Noire and their dogs  mistook him for
a wolf and he was torn with the fangs and beaten with clubs.  So
they carried him back to Las Tours and La Louve wasn't at all
impressed.  They polished him up and her husband remonstrated
seriously with her. Vidal  was, you see, a great poet and it was not
proper to treat a great poet with  indifference.

So Peire Vidal declared himself Emperor of Jerusalem or
somewhere and the  husband had to kneel down and kiss his feet
though La Louve wouldn't. And  Peire set sail in a rowing boat
with four companions to redeem the Holy  Sepulchre. And they
struck on a rock somewhere, and, at great expense, the  husband
had to fit out an expedition to fetch him back. And Peire Vidal fell 
all over the Lady's bed while the husband, who was a most
ferocious warrior,  remonstrated some more about the courtesy
that is due to great poets. But I  suppose La Louve was the more
ferocious of the two. Anyhow, that is all that  came of it. Isn't that
a story?

You haven't an idea of the queer old-fashionedness of Florence's
aunts--the  Misses Hurlbird, nor yet of her uncle. An
extraordinarily lovable man, that  Uncle John. Thin, gentle, and
with a "heart" that made his life very much  what Florence's
afterwards became. He didn't reside at Stamford; his home  was in
Waterbury where the watches come from. He had a factory there
which,  in our queer American way, would change its functions
almost from year to  year. For nine months or so it would
manufacture buttons out of bone. Then  it would suddenly produce
brass buttons for coachmen's liveries. Then it  would take a turn at
embossed tin lids for candy boxes. The fact is that the  poor old
gentleman, with his weak and fluttering heart, didn't want his 
factory to manufacture anything at all. He wanted to retire. And he
did  retire when he was seventy. But he was so worried at having
all the street  boys in the town point after him and exclaim: "There
goes the laziest man in  Waterbury!" that he tried taking a tour
round the world. And Florence and a  young man called Jimmy
went with him. It appears from what Florence told me  that
Jimmy's function with Mr Hurlbird was to avoid exciting topics for
him.  He had to keep him, for instance, out of political discussions.
For the poor  old man was a violent Democrat in days when you
might travel the world over  without finding anything but a
Republican. Anyhow, they went round the  world.

I think an anecdote is about the best way to give you an idea of
what the  old gentleman was like. For it is perhaps important that
you should know  what the old gentleman was; he had a great deal
of influence in forming the  character of my poor dear wife.

Just before they set out from San Francisco for the South Seas old
Mr  Hurlbird said he must take something with him to make little
presents to  people he met on the voyage. And it struck him that
the things to take for  that purpose were oranges--because
California is the orange country--and  comfortable folding chairs.
So he bought I don't know how many cases of  oranges--the great
cool California oranges, and half-a-dozen folding chairs  in a
special case that he always kept in his cabin. There must have been 
half a cargo of fruit.

For, to every person on board the several steamers that they
employed--to  every person with whom he had so much as a
nodding acquaintance, he gave an  orange every morning. And
they lasted him right round the girdle of this  mighty globe of ours.
When they were at North Cape, even, he saw on the  horizon, poor
dear thin man that he was, a lighthouse. "Hello," says he to 
himself, "these fellows must be very lonely. Let's take them some
oranges."  So he had a boatload of his fruit out and had himself
rowed to the  lighthouse on the horizon. The folding chairs he lent
to any lady that he  came across and liked or who seemed tired and
invalidish on the ship. And  so, guarded against his heart and,
having his niece with him, he went round  the world. . . .



He wasn't obtrusive about his heart. You wouldn't have known he
had one. He  only left it to the physical laboratory at Waterbury for
the benefit of  science, since he considered it to be quite an
extraordinary kind of heart.  And the joke of the matter was that,
when, at the age of eighty-four, just  five days before poor
Florence, he died of bronchitis there was found to be  absolutely
nothing the matter with that organ. It had certainly jumped or 
squeaked or something just sufficiently to take in the doctors, hut
it  appears that that was because of an odd formation of the lungs. I
don't much  understand about these matters.

I inherited his money because Florence died five days after him. I
wish I  hadn't. It was a great worry. I had to go out to Waterbury
just after  Florence's death because the poor dear old fellow had
left a good many  charitable bequests and I had to appoint trustees.
I didn't like the idea of  their not being properly handled.

Yes, it was a great worry. And just as I had got things roughly
settled I  received the extraordinary cable from Ashburnham
begging me to come back and  have a talk with him. And
immediately afterwards came one from Leonora  saying, "Yes,
please do come. You could be so helpful." It was as if he had  sent
the cable without consulting her and had afterwards told her.
Indeed,  that was pretty much what had happened, except that he
had told the girl and  the girl told the wife. I arrived, however, too
late to be of any good if I  could have been of any good. And then I
had my first taste of English life.  It was amazing. It was
overwhelming. I never shall forget the polished cob  that Edward,
beside me, drove; the animal's action, its high-stepping, its  skin
that was like satin. And the peace! And the red cheeks! And the 
beautiful, beautiful old house.

Just near Branshaw Teleragh it was and we descended on it from
the high,  clear, windswept waste of the New Forest. I tell you it
was amazing to  arrive there from Waterbury. And it came into my
head--for Teddy Ashburnham,  you remember, had cabled to me to
"come and have a talk" with him--that it  was unbelievable that
anything essentially calamitous could happen to that  place and
those people. I tell you it was the very spirit of peace. And 
Leonora, beautiful and smiling, with her coils of yellow hair, stood
on the  top doorstep, with a butler and footman and a maid or so
behind her. And she  just said: "So glad you've come," as if I'd run
down to lunch from a town  ten miles away, instead of having
come half the world over at the call of  two urgent telegrams.

The girl was out with the hounds, I think.  And that poor devil
beside me was in an agony. Absolute, hopeless, dumb  agony such
as passes the mind of man to imagine.

III

IT was a very hot summer, in August, 1904; and Florence had
already been  taking the baths for a month. I don't know how it
feels to be a patient at  one of those places. I never was a patient
anywhere. I daresay the patients  get a home feeling and some sort
of anchorage in the spot. They seem to like  the bath attendants,
with their cheerful faces, their air of authority,  their white linen.
But, for myself, to be at Nauheim gave me a sense--what  shall I
say?--a sense almost of nakedness--the nakedness that one feels on 
the sea-shore or in any great open space. I had no attachments, no 
accumulations. In one's own home it is as if little, innate
sympathies draw  one to particular chairs that seem to enfold one
in an embrace, or take one  along particular streets that seem
friendly when others may be hostile. And,  believe me, that feeling
is a very important part of life. I know it well,  that have been for
so long a wanderer upon the face of public resorts. And  one is too
polished up. Heaven knows I was never an untidy man. But the 
feeling that I had when, whilst poor Florence was taking her
morning bath, I  stood upon the carefully swept steps of the
Englischer Hof, looking at the  carefully arranged trees in tubs
upon the carefully arranged gravel whilst  carefully arranged
people walked past in carefully calculated gaiety, at the  carefully
calculated hour, the tall trees of the public gardens, going up to 
the right; the reddish stone of the baths--or were they white
half-timber  chlets? Upon my word I have forgotten, I who was
there so often. That will  give you the measure of how much I was
in the landscape. I could find my way  blindfolded to the hot
rooms, to the douche rooms, to the fountain in the  centre of the
quadrangle where the rusty water gushes out. Yes, I could find  my
way blindfolded. I know the exact distances. From the Hotel
Regina you  took one hundred and eighty-seven paces, then,
turning sharp, left-handed,  four hundred and twenty took you
straight down to the fountain. From the  Englischer Hof, starting
on the sidewalk, it was ninety-seven paces and the  same four
hundred and twenty, but turning lefthanded this time.

And now you understand that, having nothing in the world to
do--but nothing  whatever! I fell into the habit of counting my
footsteps. I would walk with  Florence to the baths. And, of course,
she entertained me with her  conversation. It was, as I have said,
wonderful what she could make  conversation out of. She walked
very lightly, and her hair was very nicely  done, and she dressed
beautifully and very expensively. Of course she had  money of her
own, but I shouldn't have minded. And yet you know I can't 
remember a single one of her dresses. Or I can remember just one,
a very  simple one of blue figured silk--a Chinese pattern--very full
in the skirts  and broadening out over the shoulders. And her hair
was copper-coloured, and  the heels of her shoes were exceedingly
high, so that she tripped upon the  points of her toes. And when she
came to the door of the bathing place, and  when it opened to
receive her, she would look back at me with a little  coquettish
smile, so that her cheek appeared to be caressing her shoulder.

I seem to remember that, with that dress, she wore an immensely
broad  Leghorn hat--like the Chapeau de Paille of Rubens, only
very white. The hat  would be tied with a lightly knotted scarf of
the same stuff as her dress.  She knew how to give value to her
blue eyes. And round her neck would be  some simple pink, coral
beads. And her complexion had a perfect clearness, a  perfect
smoothness . . .

Yes, that is how I most exactly remember her, in that dress, in that
hat,  looking over her shoulder at me so that the eyes flashed very
blue--dark  pebble blue . . .

And, what the devil! For whose benefit did she do it? For that of
the bath  attendant? of the passers-by? I don't know. Anyhow, it
can't have been for  me, for never, in all the years of her life, never
on any possible occasion,  or in any other place did she so smile to
me, mockingly, invitingly. Ah, she  was a riddle; but then, all other
women are riddles. And it occurs to me  that some way back I
began a sentence that I have never finished . . . It  was about the
feeling that I had when I stood on the steps of my hotel every 
morning before starting out to fetch Florence back from the bath.
Natty,  precise, well-brushed, conscious of being rather small
amongst the long  English, the lank Americans, the rotund
Germans, and the obese Russian  Jewesses, I should stand there,
tapping a cigarette on the outside of my  case, surveying for a
moment the world in the sunlight. But a day was to  come when I
was never to do it again alone. You can imagine, therefore, what 
the coming of the Ashburnhams meant to me.  I have forgotten the
aspect of many things, but I shall never forget the  aspect of the
dining-room of the Hotel Excelsior on that evening--and on so 
many other evenings. Whole castles have vanished from my
memory, whole  cities that I have never visited again, but that
white room, festooned with  papier-mach fruits and flowers; the
tall windows; the many tables; the  black screen round the door
with three golden cranes flying upward on each  panel; the
palm-tree in the centre of the room; the swish of the waiter's  feet;
the cold expensive elegance; the mien of the diners as they came
in  every evening--their air of earnestness as if they must go
through a meal  prescribed by the Kur authorities and their air of
sobriety as if they must  seek not by any means to enjoy their
meals--those things I shall not easily  forget. And then, one
evening, in the twilight, I saw Edward Ashburnham  lounge round
the screen into the room. The head waiter, a man with a face  all
grey--in what subterranean nooks or corners do people cultivate
those  absolutely grey complexions?--went with the timorous
patronage of these  creatures towards him and held out a grey ear
to be whispered into. It was  generally a disagreeable ordeal for
newcomers but Edward Ashburnham bore it  like an Englishman
and a gentleman. I could see his lips form a word of  three
syllables--remember I had nothing in the world to do but to notice 
these niceties--and immediately I knew that he must be Edward
Ashburnham,  Captain, Fourteenth Hussars, of Branshaw House,
Branshaw Teleragh. I knew it  because every evening just before
dinner, whilst I waited in the hall, I  used, by the courtesy of
Monsieur Schontz, the proprietor, to inspect the  little police
reports that each guest was expected to sign upon taking a  room.

The head waiter piloted him immediately to a vacant table, three
away from  my own--the table that the Grenfalls of Falls River,
N.J., had just vacated.  It struck me that that was not a very nice
table for the newcomers, since  the sunlight, low though it was,
shone straight down upon it, and the same  idea seemed to come at
the same moment into Captain Ashburnham's head. His  face
hitherto had, in the wonderful English fashion, expressed nothing 
whatever. Nothing. There was in it neither joy nor despair; neither
hope nor  fear; neither boredom nor satisfaction. He seemed to
perceive no soul in  that crowded room; he might have been
walking in a jungle. I never came  across such a perfect expression
before and I never shall again. It was  insolence and not insolence;
it was modesty and not modesty. His hair was  fair, extraordinarily
ordered in a wave, running from the left temple to the  right; his
face was a light brick-red, perfectly uniform in tint up to the  roots
of the hair itself; his yellow moustache was as stiff as a toothbrush 
and I verily believe that he had his black smoking jacket thickened
a little  over the shoulder-blades so as to give himself the air of the
slightest  possible stoop. It would be like him to do that; that was
the sort of thing  he thought about. Martingales, Chiffney bits,
boots; where you got the best  soap, the best brandy, the name of
the chap who rode a plater down the  Khyber cliffs; the spreading
power of number three shot before a charge of  number four
powder . . . by heavens, I hardly ever heard him talk of  anything
else. Not in all the years that I knew him did I hear him talk of 
anything but these subjects. Oh, yes, once he told me that I could
buy my  special shade of blue ties cheaper from a firm in
Burlington Arcade than  from my own people in New York. And I
have bought my ties from that firm  ever since. Otherwise I should
not remember the name of the Burlington  Arcade. I wonder what
it looks like. I have never seen it. I imagine it to  be two immense
rows of pillars, like those of the Forum at Rome, with Edward 
Ashburnham striding down between them. But it probably
isn't--the least like  that. Once also he advised me to buy
Caledonian Deferred, since they were  due to rise. And I did buy
them and they did rise. But of how he got the  knowledge I haven't
the faintest idea. It seemed to drop out of the blue  sky.

And that was absolutely all that I knew of him until a month
ago--that and  the profusion of his cases, all of pigskin and
stamped with his initials, E.  F. A. There were gun cases, and
collar cases, and shirt cases, and letter  cases and cases each
containing four bottles of medicine; and hat cases and  helmet
cases. It must have needed a whole herd of the Gadarene swine to
make  up his outfit. And, if I ever penetrated into his private room
it would be  to see him standing, with his coat and waistcoat off
and the immensely long  line of his perfectly elegant trousers from
waist to boot heel. And he would  have a slightly reflective air and
he would be just opening one kind of case  and just closing
another.

Good God, what did they all see in him? for I swear there was all
there was  of him, inside and out; though they said he was a good
soldier. Yet, Leonora  adored him with a passion that was like an
agony, and hated him with an  agony that was as bitter as the sea.
How could he arouse anything like a  sentiment, in anybody?

What did he even talk to them about--when they were under four
eyes? --Ah,  well, suddenly, as if by a flash of inspiration, I know.
For all good  soldiers are sentimentalists--all good soldiers of that
type. Their  profession, for one thing, is full of the big words,
courage, loyalty,  honour, constancy. And I have given a wrong
impression of Edward Ashburnham  if I have made you think that
literally never in the course of our nine  years of intimacy did he
discuss what he would have called "the graver  things." Even
before his final outburst to me, at times, very late at night,  say, he
has blurted out something that gave an insight into the sentimental 
view of the cosmos that was his. He would say how much the
society of a good  woman could do towards redeeming you, and he
would say that constancy was  the finest of the virtues. He said it
very stiffly, of course, but still as  if the statement admitted of no
doubt.

Constancy! Isn't that the queer thought? And yet, I must add that
poor dear  Edward was a great reader--he would pass hours lost in
novels of a  sentimental type--novels in which typewriter girls
married Marquises and  governesses Earls. And in his books, as a
rule, the course of true love ran  as smooth as buttered honey. And
he was fond of poetry, of a certain  type--and he could even read a
perfectly sad love story. I have seen his  eyes filled with tears at
reading of a hopeless parting. And he loved, with  a sentimental
yearning, all children, puppies, and the feeble generally. . .  .

So, you see, he would have plenty to gurgle about to a
woman--with that and  his sound common sense about martingales
and his--still  sentimental--experiences as a county magistrate; and
with his intense,  optimistic belief that the woman he was making
love to at the moment was the  one he was destined, at last, to be
eternally constant to. . . . Well, I  fancy he could put up a pretty
good deal of talk when there was no man  around to make him feel
shy. And I was quite astonished, during his final  burst out to
me--at the very end of things, when the poor girl was on her  way
to that fatal Brindisi and he was trying to persuade himself and me
that  he had never really cared for her--I was quite astonished to
observe how  literary and how just his expressions were. He talked
like quite a good  book--a book not in the least cheaply
sentimental. You see, I suppose he  regarded me not so much as a
man. I had to be regarded as a woman or a  solicitor. Anyhow, it
burst out of him on that horrible night. And then,  next morning, he
took me over to the Assizes and I saw how, in a perfectly  calm
and business-like way, he set to work to secure a verdict of not
guilty  for a poor girl, the daughter of one of his tenants, who had
been accused of  murdering her baby. He spent two hundred
pounds on her defence . . . Well,  that was Edward Ashburnham.

I had forgotten about his eyes. They were as blue as the sides of a
certain  type of box of matches. When you looked at them
carefully you saw that they  were perfectly honest, perfectly
straightforward, perfectly, perfectly  stupid. But the brick pink of
his complexion, running perfectly level to the  brick pink of his
inner eyelids, gave them a curious, sinister  expression--like a
mosaic of blue porcelain set in pink china. And that  chap, coming
into a room, snapped up the gaze of every woman in it, as 
dexterously as a conjurer pockets billiard balls. It was most
amazing. You  know the man on the stage who throws up sixteen
balls at once and they all  drop into pockets all over his person, on
his shoulders, on his heels, on  the inner side of his sleeves; and he
stands perfectly still and does  nothing. Well, it was like that. He
had rather a rough, hoarse voice.

And, there he was, standing by the table. I was looking at him,
with my back  to the screen. And suddenly, I saw two distinct
expressions flicker across  his immobile eyes. How the deuce did
they do it, those unflinching blue eyes  with the direct gaze? For
the eyes themselves never moved, gazing over my  shoulder
towards the screen. And the gaze was perfectly level and perfectly 
direct and perfectly unchanging. I suppose that the lids really must
have  rounded themselves a little and perhaps the lips moved a
little too, as if  he should be saying: "There you are, my dear." At
any rate, the expression  was that of pride, of satisfaction, of the
possessor. I saw him once  afterwards, for a moment, gaze upon
the sunny fields of Branshaw and say:  "All this is my land!"

And then again, the gaze was perhaps more direct, harder if
possible--hardy  too. It was a measuring look; a challenging look.
Once when we were at  Wiesbaden watching him play in a polo
match against the Bonner Hussaren I  saw the same look come into
his eyes, balancing the possibilities, looking  over the ground. The
German Captain, Count Baron Idigon von Lelffel, was  right up
by their goal posts, coming with the ball in an easy canter in that 
tricky German fashion. The rest of the field were just anywhere. It
was only  a scratch sort of affair. Ashburnham was quite close to
the rails not five  yards from us and I heard him saying to himself:
"Might just be done!" And  he did it. Goodness! he swung that
pony round with all its four legs spread  out, like a cat dropping off
a roof. . . .

Well, it was just that look that I noticed in his eyes: "It might," I
seem  even now to hear him muttering to himself, "just be done."

I looked round over my shoulder and saw, tall, smiling brilliantly
and  buoyant--Leonora. And, little and fair, and as radiant as the
track of  sunlight along the sea--my wife.

That poor wretch! to think that he was at that moment in a perfect
devil of  a fix, and there he was, saying at the back of his mind: "It
might just be  done." It was like a chap in the middle of the
eruption of a volcano, saying  that he might just manage to bolt
into the tumult and set fire to a  haystack. Madness?
Predestination? Who the devil knows?

Mrs Ashburnham exhibited at that moment more gaiety than I have
ever since  known her to show. There are certain classes of English
people--the nicer  ones when they have been to many spas, who
seem to make a point of becoming  much more than usually
animated when they are introduced to my compatriots.  I have
noticed this often. Of course, they must first have accepted the 
Americans. But that once done, they seem to say to themselves:
"Hallo, these  women are so bright. We aren't going to be outdone
in brightness." And for  the time being they certainly aren't. But it
wears off. So it was with  Leonora--at least until she noticed me.
She began, Leonora did--and perhaps  it was that that gave me the
idea of a touch of insolence in her character,  for she never
afterwards did any one single thing like it--she began by  saying in
quite a loud voice and from quite a distance:

"Don't stop over by that stuffy old table, Teddy. Come and sit by
these nice  people!"

And that was an extraordinary thing to say. Quite extraordinary. I
couldn't  for the life of me refer to total strangers as nice people.
But, of course,  she was taking a line of her own in which I at any
rate--and no one else in  the room, for she too had taken the
trouble to read through the list of  guests--counted any more than
so many clean, bull terriers. And she sat down  rather brilliantly at
a vacant table, beside ours--one that was reserved for  the
Guggenheimers. And she just sat absolutely deaf to the
remonstrances of  the head waiter with his face like a grey ram's.
That poor chap was doing  his steadfast duty too. He knew that the
Guggenheimers of Chicago, after  they had stayed there a month
and had worried the poor life out of him,  would give him two
dollars fifty and grumble at the tipping system. And he  knew that
Teddy Ashburnham and his wife would give him no trouble
whatever  except what the smiles of Leonora might cause in his
apparently  unimpressionable bosom--though you never can tell
what may go on behind even  a not quite spotless plastron! --And
every week Edward Ashburnham would give  him a solid, sound,
golden English sovereign. Yet this stout fellow was  intent on
saving that table for the Guggenheimers of Chicago. It ended in 
Florence saying:

"Why shouldn't we all eat out of the same trough? --that's a nasty
New York  saying. But I'm sure we're all nice quiet people and
there can be four seats  at our table. It's round."

Then came, as it were, an appreciative gurgle from the Captain and
I was  perfectly aware of a slight hesitation--a quick sharp motion
in Mrs  Ashburnham, as if her horse had checked. But she put it at
the fence all  right, rising from the seat she had taken and sitting
down opposite me, as  it were, all in one motion.  I never thought
that Leonora looked her best in evening dress. She seemed to  get
it too clearly cut, there was no ruffling. She always affected black
and  her shoulders were too classical. She seemed to stand out of
her corsage as  a white marble bust might out of a black
Wedgwood vase. I don't know.

I loved Leonora always and, today, I would very cheerfully lay
down my life,  what is left of it, in her service. But I am sure I
never had the beginnings  of a trace of what is called the sex
instinct towards her. And I suppose--no  I am certain that she never
had it towards me. As far as I am concerned I  think it was those
white shoulders that did it. I seemed to feel when I  looked at them
that, if ever I should press my lips upon them that they  would be
slightly cold--not icily, not without a touch of human heat, but,  as
they say of baths, with the chill off. I seemed to feel chilled at the 
end of my lips when I looked at her . . .

No, Leonora always appeared to me at her best in a blue
tailor-made. Then  her glorious hair wasn't deadened by her white
shoulders. Certain women's  lines guide your eyes to their necks,
their eyelashes, their lips, their  breasts. But Leonora's seemed to
conduct your gaze always to her wrist. And  the wrist was at its
best in a black or a dog-skin glove and there was  always a gold
circlet with a little chain supporting a very small golden key  to a
dispatch box. Perhaps it was that in which she locked up her heart
and  her feelings.

Anyhow, she sat down opposite me and then, for the first time, she
paid any  attention to my existence. She gave me, suddenly, yet
deliberately, one long  stare. Her eyes too were blue and dark and
the eyelids were so arched that  they gave you the whole round of
the irises. And it was a most remarkable, a  most moving glance,
as if for a moment a lighthouse had looked at me. I  seemed to
perceive the swift questions chasing each other through the brain 
that was behind them. I seemed to hear the brain ask and the eyes
answer  with all the simpleness of a woman who was a good hand
at taking in  qualities of a horse--as indeed she was. "Stands well;
has plenty of room  for his oats behind the girth. Not so much in
the way of shoulders," and so  on. And so her eyes asked: "Is this
man trustworthy in money matters; is he  likely to try to play the
lover; is he likely to let his women be  troublesome? Is he, above
all, likely to babble about my affairs?"

And, suddenly, into those cold, slightly defiant, almost defensive
china  blue orbs, there came a warmth, a tenderness, a friendly
recognition . . .  oh, it was very charming and very touching--and
quite mortifying. It was the  look of a mother to her son, of a sister
to her brother. It implied trust;  it implied the want of any necessity
for barriers. By God, she looked at me  as if I were an invalid--as
any kind woman may look at a poor chap in a bath  chair. And,
yes, from that day forward she always treated me and not  Florence
as if I were the invalid. Why, she would run after me with a rug 
upon chilly days. I suppose, therefore, that her eyes had made a
favourable  answer. Or, perhaps, it wasn't a favourable answer.
And then Florence said:  "And so the whole round table is begun."
Again Edward Ashburnham gurgled  slightly in his throat; but
Leonora shivered a little, as if a goose had  walked over her grave.
And I was passing her the nickel-silver basket of  rolls. Avanti! . . . 

IV 

So began those nine years of uninterrupted tranquillity. They were 
characterized by an extraordinary want of any communicativeness
on the part  of the Ashburnhams to which we, on our part, replied
by leaving out quite as  extraordinarily, and nearly as completely,
the personal note. Indeed, you  may take it that what characterized
our relationship was an atmosphere of  taking everything for
granted. The given proposition was, that we were all  "good
people." We took for granted that we all liked beef underdone but
not  too underdone; that both men preferred a good liqueur brandy
after lunch;  that both women drank a very light Rhine wine
qualified with Fachingen  water--that sort of thing. It was also
taken for granted that we were both  sufficiently well off to afford
anything that we could reasonably want in  the way of amusements
fitting to our station--that we could take motor cars  and carriages
by the day; that we could give each other dinners and dine our 
friends and we could indulge if we liked in economy. Thus,
Florence was in  the habit of having the Daily Telegraph sent to
her every day from London.  She was always an Anglo-maniac,
was Florence; the Paris edition of the New  York Herald was
always good enough for me. But when we discovered that the 
Ashburnhams' copy of the London paper followed them from
England, Leonora  and Florence decided between them to suppress
one subscription one year and  the other the next. Similarly it was
the habit of the Grand Duke of Nassau  Schwerin, who came
yearly to the baths, to dine once with about eighteen  families of
regular Kur guests. In return he would give a dinner of all the 
eighteen at once. And, since these dinners were rather expensive
(you had to  take the Grand Duke and a good many of his suite and
any members of the  diplomatic bodies that might be
there)--Florence and Leonora, putting their  heads together, didn't
see why we shouldn't give the Grand Duke his dinner  together.
And so we did. I don't suppose the Serenity minded that economy, 
or even noticed it. At any rate, our joint dinner to the Royal
Personage  gradually assumed the aspect of a yearly function.
Indeed, it grew larger  and larger, until it became a sort of closing
function for the season, at  any rate as far as we were concerned.  I
don't in the least mean to say that we were the sort of persons who 
aspired to mix "with royalty." We didn't; we hadn't any claims; we
were just  "good people." But the Grand Duke was a pleasant,
affable sort of royalty,  like the late King Edward VII, and it was
pleasant to hear him talk about  the races and, very occasionally, as
a bonne bouche, about his nephew, the  Emperor; or to have him
pause for a moment in his walk to ask after the  progress of our
cures or to be benignantly interested in the amount of money  we
had put on Lelffel's hunter for the Frankfurt Welter Stakes.

But upon my word, I don't know how we put in our time. How
does one put in  one's time? How is it possible to have achieved
nine years and to have  nothing whatever to show for it? Nothing
whatever, you understand. Not so  much as a bone penholder,
carved to resemble a chessman and with a hole in  the top through
which you could see four views of Nauheim. And, as for 
experience, as for knowledge of one's fellow beings--nothing
either. Upon my  word, I couldn't tell you offhand whether the lady
who sold the so expensive  violets at the bottom of the road that
leads to the station, was cheating me  or no; I can't say whether the
porter who carried our traps across the  station at Leghorn was a
thief or no when he said that the regular tariff  was a lira a parcel.
The instances of honesty that one comes across in this  world are
just as amazing as the instances of dishonesty. After forty-five 
years of mixing with one's kind, one ought to have acquired the
habit of  being able to know something about one's fellow beings.
But one doesn't.

I think the modern civilized habit--the modern English habit of
taking every  one for granted--is a good deal to blame for this. I
have observed this  matter long enough to know the queer, subtle
thing that it is; to know how  the faculty, for what it is worth, never
lets you down.

Mind, I am not saying that this is not the most desirable type of life
in  the world; that it is not an almost unreasonably high standard.
For it is  really nauseating, when you detest it, to have to eat every
day several  slices of thin, tepid, pink india rubber, and it is
disagreeable to have to  drink brandy when you would prefer to be
cheered up by warm, sweet Kmmel.  And it is nasty to have to
take a cold bath in the morning when what you  want is really a hot
one at night. And it stirs a little of the faith of  your fathers that is
deep down within you to have to have it taken for  granted that you
are an Episcopalian when really you are an old-fashioned 
Philadelphia Quaker.

But these things have to be done; it is the cock that the whole of
this  society owes to sculapius.

And the odd, queer thing is that the whole collection of rules
applies to  anybody--to the anybodies that you meet in hotels, in
railway trains, to a  less degree, perhaps, in steamers, but even, in
the end, upon steamers. You  meet a man or a woman and, from
tiny and intimate sounds, from the slightest  of movements, you
know at once whether you are concerned with good people or  with
those who won't do. You know, this is to say, whether they will go 
rigidly through with the whole programme from the underdone
beef to the  Anglicanism. It won't matter whether they be short or
tall; whether the  voice squeak like a marionette or rumble like a
town bull's; it won't matter  whether they are Germans, Austrians,
French, Spanish, or even Brazilians--  they will be the Germans or
Brazilians who take a cold bath every morning  and who move,
roughly speaking, in diplomatic circles.

But the inconvenient--well, hang it all, I will say it--the damnable 
nuisance of the whole thing is, that with all the taking for granted,
you  never really get an inch deeper than the things I have
catalogued.

I can give you a rather extraordinary instance of this. I can't
remember  whether it was in our first year--the first year of us four
at Nauheim,  because, of course, it would have been the fourth
year of Florence and  myself--but it must have been in the first or
second year. And that gives  the measure at once of the
extraordinariness of our discussion and of the  swiftness with
which intimacy had grown up between us. On the one hand we 
seemed to start out on the expedition so naturally and with so little 
preparation, , that it was as if we must have made many such
excursions  before; and our intimacy seemed so deep. . . .

Yet the place to which we went was obviously one to which
Florence at least  would have wanted to take us quite early, so that
you would almost think we  should have gone there together at the
beginning of our intimacy. Florence  was singularly expert as a
guide to archaeological expeditions and there was  nothing she
liked so much as taking people round ruins and showing you the 
window from which some one looked down upon the murder of
some one else. She  only did it once; but she did it quite
magnificently. She could find her  way, with the sole help of
Baedeker, as easily about any old monument as she  could about
any American city where the blocks are all square and the  streets
all numbered, so that you can go perfectly easily from
Twenty-fourth  to Thirtieth.

Now it happens that fifty minutes away from Nauheim, by a good
train, is the  ancient city of M----, upon a great pinnacle of basalt,
girt with a triple  road running sideways up its shoulder like a
scarf. And at the top there is  a castle--not a square castle like
Windsor, but a castle all slate gables  and high peaks with gilt
weathercocks flashing bravely--the castle of St  Elizabeth of
Hungary. It has the disadvantage of being in Prussia; and it is 
always disagreeable to go into that country; but it is very old and
there  are many double-spired churches and it stands up like a
pyramid out of the  green valley of the Lahn. I don't suppose the
Ashburnhams wanted especially  to go there and I didn't especially
want to go there myself. But, you  understand, there was no
objection. It was part of the cure to make an  excursion three or
four times a week. So that we were all quite unanimous in  being
grateful to Florence for providing the motive power. Florence, of 
course, had a motive of her own. She was at that time engaged in
educating  Captain Ashburnham--oh, of course, quite pour le bon
motif! She used to say  to Leonora: "I simply can't understand how
you can let him live by your side  and be so ignorant!" Leonora
herself always struck me as being remarkably  well educated. At
any rate, she knew beforehand all that Florence had to  tell her.
Perhaps she got it up out of Baedeker before Florence was up in 
the morning. I don't mean to say that you would ever have known
that Leonora  knew anything, but if Florence started to tell us how
Ludwig the Courageous  wanted to have three wives at once--in
which he differed from Henry VIII,  who wanted them one after
the other, and this caused a good deal of  trouble--if Florence
started to tell us this, Leonora would just nod her  head in a way
that quite pleasantly rattled my poor wife.

She used to exclaim: "Well, if you knew it, why haven't you told it
all  already to Captain Ashburnham? I'm sure he finds it
interesting!" And  Leonora would look reflectively at her husband
and say: "I have an idea that  it might injure his hand--the hand,
you know, used in connection with  horses' mouths. . . ." And poor
Ashburnham would blush and mutter and would  say: "That's all
right. Don't you bother about me."

I fancy his wife's irony did quite alarm poor Teddy; because one
evening he  asked me seriously in the smoking-room if I thought
that having too much in  one's head would really interfere with
one's quickness in polo. It struck  him, he said, that brainy
Johnnies generally were rather muffs when they got  on to four
legs. I reassured him as best I could. I told him that he wasn't 
likely to take in enough to upset his balance. At that time the
Captain was  quite evidently enjoying being educated by Florence.
She used to do it about  three or four times a week under the
approving eyes of Leonora and myself.  It wasn't, you understand,
systematic. It came in bursts. It was Florence  clearing up one of
the dark places of the earth, leaving the world a little  lighter than
she had found it. She would tell him the story of Hamlet;  explain
the form of a symphony, humming the first and second subjects to 
him, and so on; she would explain to him the difference between
Arminians  and Erastians; or she would give him a short lecture on
the early history of  the United States. And it was done in a way
well calculated to arrest a  young attention. Did you ever read Mrs
Markham? Well, it was like that. . .  .

But our excursion to M---- was a much larger, a much more full
dress affair.  You see, in the archives of the Schloss in that city
there was a document  which Florence thought would finally give
her the chance to educate the  whole lot of us together. It really
worried poor Florence that she couldn't,  in matters of culture, ever
get the better of Leonora. I don't know what  Leonora knew or
what she didn't know, but certainly she was always there 
whenever Florence brought out any information. And she gave,
somehow, the  impression of really knowing what poor Florence
gave the impression of  having only picked up. I can't exactly
define it. It was almost something  physical. Have you ever seen a
retriever dashing in play after a greyhound?  You see the two
running over a green field, almost side by side, and  suddenly the
retriever makes a friendly snap at the other. And the greyhound 
simply isn't there. You haven't observed it quicken its speed or
strain a  limb; but there it is, just two yards in front of the
retriever's  outstretched muzzle. So it was with Florence and
Leonora in matters of  culture.

But on this occasion I knew that something was up. I found
Florence some  days before, reading books like Ranke's History of
the Popes, Symonds'  Renaissance, Motley's Rise of the Dutch
Republic and Luther's Table Talk.

I must say that, until the astonishment came, I got nothing but
pleasure out  of the little expedition. I like catching the two-forty; I
like the slow,  smooth roll of the great big trains--and they are the
best trains in the  world! I like being drawn through the green
country and looking at it  through the clear glass of the great
windows. Though, of course, the country  isn't really green. The
sun shines, the earth is blood red and purple and  red and green
and red. And the oxen in the ploughlands are bright varnished 
brown and black and blackish purple; and the peasants are dressed
in the  black and white of magpies; and there are great Rocks of
magpies too. Or the  peasants' dresses in another field where there
are little mounds of hay that  will be grey-green on the sunny side
and purple in the shadows--the  peasants' dresses are vermilion
with emerald green ribbons and purple skirts  and white shirts and
black velvet stomachers. Still, the impression is that  you are
drawn through brilliant green meadows that run away on each side
to  the dark purple fir-woods; the basalt pinnacles; the immense
forests. And  there is meadowsweet at the edge of the streams, and
cattle. Why, I remember  on that afternoon I saw a brown cow
hitch its horns under the stomach of a  black and white animal and
the black and white one was thrown right into the  middle of a
narrow stream. I burst out laughing. But Florence was imparting 
information so hard and Leonora was listening so intently that no
one  noticed me. As for me, I was pleased to be off duty; I was
pleased to think  that Florence for the moment was indubitably out
of mischief--because she  was talking about Ludwig the
Courageous (I think it was Ludwig the  Courageous but I am not an
historian) about Ludwig the Courageous of Hessen  who wanted to
have three wives at once and patronized Luther--something like 
that!--I was so relieved to be off duty, because she couldn't
possibly be  doing anything to excite herself or set her poor heart
a-fluttering--that  the incident of the cow was a real joy to me. I
chuckled over it from time  to time for the whole rest of the day.
Because it does look very funny, you  know, to see a black and
white cow land on its back in the middle of a  stream. It is so just
exactly what one doesn't expect of a cow.

I suppose I ought to have pitied the poor animal; but I just didn't. I
was  out for enjoyment. And I just enjoyed myself. It is so pleasant
to be drawn  along in front of the spectacular towns with the
peaked castles and the many  double spires. In the sunlight gleams
come from the city--gleams from the  glass of windows; from the
gilt signs of apothecaries; from the ensigns of  the student corps
high up in the mountains; from the helmets of the funny  little
soldiers moving their stiff little legs in white linen trousers. And  it
was pleasant to get out in the great big spectacular Prussian station 
with the hammered bronze ornaments and the paintings of
peasants and flowers  and cows; and to hear Florence bargain
energetically with the driver of an  ancient droschka drawn by two
lean horses. Of course, I spoke German much  more correctly than
Florence, though I never could rid myself quite of the  accent of
the Pennsylvania Duitsch of my childhood. Anyhow, we were
drawn in  a sort of triumph, for five marks without any trinkgeld,
right up to the  castle. And we were taken through the museum and
saw the fire-backs, the old  glass, the old swords and the antique
contraptions. And we went up winding  corkscrew staircases and
through the Rittersaal, the great painted hall  where the Reformer
and his friends met for the first time under the  protection of the
gentleman that had three wives at once and formed an  alliance
with the gentleman that had six wives, one after the other (I'm not 
really interested in these facts but they have a bearing on my
story). And  we went through chapels, and music rooms, right up
immensely high in the air  to a large old chamber, full of presses,
with heavily-shuttered windows all  round. And Florence became
positively electric. She told the tired, bored  custodian what
shutters to open; so that the bright sunlight streamed in  palpable
shafts into the dim old chamber. She explained that this was 
Luther's bedroom and that just where the sunlight fell had stood his
bed. As  a matter of fact, I believe that she was wrong and that
Luther only stopped,  as it were, for lunch, in order to evade
pursuit. But, no doubt, it would  have been his bedroom if he could
have been persuaded to stop the night. And  then, in spite of the
protest of the custodian, she threw open another  shutter and came
tripping back to a large glass case.

"And there," she exclaimed with an accent of gaiety, of triumph,
and of  audacity. She was pointing at a piece of paper, like the
half-sheet of a  letter with some faint pencil scrawls that might
have been a jotting of the  amounts we were spending during the
day. And I was extremely happy at her  gaiety, in her triumph, in
her audacity. Captain Ashburnham had his hands  upon the glass
case. "There it is--the Protest." And then, as we all  properly
stage-managed our bewilderment, she continued: "Don't you know
that  is why we were all called Protestants? That is the pencil draft
of the  Protest they drew up. You can see the signatures of Martin
Luther, and  Martin Bucer, and Zwingli, and Ludwig the
Courageous. . . ."

I may have got some of the names wrong, but I know that Luther
and Bucer  were there. And her animation continued and I was
glad. She was better and  she was out of mischief. She continued,
looking up into Captain Ashburnham's  eyes: "It's because of that
piece of paper that you're honest, sober,  industrious, provident,
and clean-lived. If it weren't for that piece of  paper you'd be like
the Irish or the Italians or the Poles, but particularly  the Irish. . . ."

And she laid one finger upon Captain Ashburnham' s wrist.

I was aware of something treacherous, something frightful,
something evil in  the day. I can't define it and can't find a simile
for it. It wasn't as if a  snake had looked out of a hole. No, it was as
if my heart had missed a beat.  It was as if we were going to run
and cry out; all four of us in separate  directions, averting our
heads. In Ashburnham's face I know that there was  absolute panic.
I was horribly frightened and then I discovered that the  pain in my
left wrist was caused by Leonora's clutching it:

"I can't stand this," she said with a most extraordinary passion; "I
must  get out of this."  I was horribly frightened. It came to me for
a moment, though I hadn't time  to think it, that she must be a
madly jealous woman--jealous of Florence and  Captain
Ashburnham, of all people in the world! And it was a panic in
which  we fled! We went right down the winding stairs, across the
immense  Rittersaal to a little terrace that overlooks the Lahn, the
broad valley and  the immense plain into which it opens out.

"Don't you see?" she said, "don't you see what's going on?" The
panic again  stopped my heart. I muttered, I stuttered--I don't know
how I got the words  out:

"No! What's the matter? Whatever's the matter?"

She looked me straight in the eyes; and for a moment I had the
feeling that  those two blue discs were immense, were
overwhelming, were like a wall of  blue that shut me off from the
rest of the world. I know it sounds absurd;  but that is what it did
feel like.

"Don't you see," she said, with a really horrible bitterness, with a
really  horrible lamentation in her voice, "Don't you see that that's
the cause of  the whole miserable affair; of the whole sorrow of the
world? And of the  eternal damnation of you and me and them. . .
."

I don't remember how she went on; I was too frightened; I was too
amazed. I  think I was thinking of running to fetch assistance--a
doctor, perhaps, or  Captain Ashburnham. Or possibly she needed
Florence's tender care, though,  of course, it would have been very
bad for Florence's heart. But I know that  when I came out of it she
was saying: "Oh, where are all the bright, happy,  innocent beings
in the world? Where's happiness? One reads of it in books!"

She ran her hand with a singular clawing motion upwards over her
forehead.  Her eyes were enormously distended; her face was
exactly that of a person  looking into the pit of hell and seeing
horrors there. And then suddenly she  stopped. She was, most
amazingly, just Mrs Ashburnham again. Her face was  perfectly
clear, sharp and defined; her hair was glorious in its golden  coils.
Her nostrils twitched with a sort of contempt. She appeared to look 
with interest at a gypsy caravan that was coming over a little
bridge far  below us.

"Don't you know," she said, in her clear hard voice, "don't you
know that  I'm an Irish Catholic?"

V THOSE words gave me the greatest relief that I have ever had in
my life.  They told me, I think, almost more than I have ever
gathered at any one  moment--about myself. I don't think that
before that day I had ever wanted  anything very much except
Florence. I have, of course, had appetites,  impatiences . . . Why,
sometimes at a table d'hte, when there would be,  say, caviare
handed round, I have been absolutely full of impatience for  fear
that when the dish came to me there should not be a satisfying
portion  left over by the other guests. I have been exceedingly
impatient at missing  trains. The Belgian State Railway has a trick
of letting the French trains  miss their connections at Brussels.
That has always infuriated me. I have  written about it letters to
The Times that The Times never printed; those  that I wrote to the
Paris edition of the New York Herald were always  printed, but
they never seemed to satisfy me when I saw them. Well, that was 
a sort of frenzy with me.

It was a frenzy that now I can hardly realize. I can understand it 
intellectually. You see, in those days I was interested in people
with  "hearts." There was Florence, there was Edward
Ashburnham--or, perhaps, it  was Leonora that I was more
interested in. I don't mean in the way of love.  But, you see, we
were both of the. same profession--at any rate as I saw it.  And the
profession was that of keeping heart patients alive.

You have no idea how engrossing such a profession may become.
Just as the  blacksmith says: "By hammer and hand all Art doth
stand," just as the baker  thinks that all the solar system revolves
around his morning delivery of  rolls, as the postmaster-general
believes that he alone is the preserver of  society--and surely,
surely, these delusions are necessary to keep us  going--so did I
and, as I believed, Leonora, imagine that the whole world  ought to
be arranged so as to ensure the keeping alive of heart patients. 
You have no idea how engrossing such a profession may
become--how imbecile,  in view of that engrossment, appear the
ways of princes, of republics, of  municipalities. A rough bit of
road beneath the motor tyres, a couple of  succeeding
"thank'ee-marms" with their quick jolts would be enough to set me 
grumbling to Leonora against the Prince or the Grand Duke or the
Free City  through whose territory we might be passing. I would
grumble like a  stockbroker whose conversations over the
telephone are incommoded by the  ringing of bells from a city
church. I would talk about medieval survivals,  about the taxes
being surely high enough. The point, by the way, about the 
missing of the connections of the Calais boat trains at Brussels was
that  the shortest possible sea journey is frequently of great
importance to  sufferers from the heart. Now, on the Continent,
there are two special heart  cure places, Nauheim and Spa, and to
reach both of these baths from England  if in order to ensure a
short sea passage, you come by Calais--you have to  make the
connection at Brussels. And the Belgian train never waits by so 
much the shade of a second for the one coming from Calais or
from Paris. And  even if the French train, are just on time, you
have to run--imagine a heart  patient running! --along the
unfamiliar ways of the Brussels station and to  scramble up the
high steps of the moving train. Or, if you miss connection,  you
have to wait five or six hours. . . . I used to keep awake whole
nights  cursing that abuse.  My wife used to run--she never, in
whatever else she may have misled me,  tried to give me the
impression that she was not a gallant soul. But, once  in the
German Express, she would lean back, with one hand to her side
and  her eyes closed. Well, she was a good actress. And I would be
in hell. In  hell, I tell you. For in Florence I had at once a wife and
an unattained  mistress--that is what it comes to--and in the
retaining of her in this  world I had my occupation, my career, my
ambition. It is not often that  these things are united in one body.
Leonora was a good actress too. By Jove  she was good! I tell you,
she would listen to me by the hour, evolving my  plans for a
shock-proof world. It is true that, at times, I used to notice  about
her an air of inattention as if she were listening, a mother, to the 
child at her knee, or as if, precisely, I were myself the patient.

You understand that there was nothing the matter with Edward
Ashburnham's  heart--that he had thrown up his commission and
had left India and come half  the world over in order to follow a
woman who had really had a "heart" to  Nauheim. That was the
sort of sentimental ass he was. For, you understand,  too, that they
really needed to live in India, to economize, to let the  house at
Branshaw Teleragh.

Of course, at that date, I had never heard of the Kilsyte case.
Ashburnham  had, you know, kissed a servant girl in a railway
train, and it was only the  grace of God, the prompt functioning of
the communication cord and the ready  sympathy of what I believe
you call the Hampshire Bench, that kept the poor  devil out of
Winchester Gaol for years and years. I never heard of that case 
until the final stages of Leonora's revelations. . . .

But just think of that poor wretch. . . . I, who have surely the right,
beg  you to think of that poor wretch. Is it possible that such a
luckless devil  should be so tormented by blind and inscrutable
destiny? For there is no  other way to think of it. None. I have the
right to say it, since for years  he was my wife's lover, since he
killed her, since he broke up all the  pleasantnesses that there were
in my life. There is no priest that has the  right to tell me that I
must not ask pity for him, from you, silent listener  beyond the
hearth-stone, from the world, or from the God who created in him 
those desires, those madnesses. . . .

Of course, I should not hear of the Kilsyte case. I knew none of
their  friends; they were for me just good people--fortunate people
with broad and  sunny acres in a southern county. Just good
people! By heavens, I sometimes  think that it would have been
better for him, poor dear, if the case had  been such a one that I
must needs have heard of it--such a one as maids and  couriers and
other Kur guests whisper about for years after, until gradually  it
dies away in the pity that there is knocking about here and there in
the  world. Supposing he had spent his seven years in Winchester
Gaol or whatever  it is that inscrutable and blind justice allots to
you for following your  natural but ill-timed inclinations--there
would have arrived a stage when  nodding gossips on the Kursaal
terrace would have said, "Poor fellow,"  thinking of his ruined
career. He would have been the fine soldier with his  back now
bent. . . . Better for him, poor devil, if his back had been 
prematurely bent.

Why, it would have been a thousand times better. . . . For, of
course, the  Kilsyte case, which came at the very beginning of his
finding Leonora cold  and unsympathetic, gave him a nasty jar. He
left servants alone after that.

It turned him, naturally, all the more loose amongst women of his
own class.  Why, Leonora told me that Mrs Maidan--the woman he
followed from Burma to  Nauheim--assured her he awakened her
attention by swearing that when he  kissed the servant in the train
he was driven to it. I daresay he was driven  to it, by the mad
passion to find an ultimately satisfying woman. I daresay  he was
sincere enough. Heaven help me, I daresay he was sincere enough
in  his love for Mrs Maidan. She was a nice little thing, a dear little
dark  woman with long lashes, of whom Florence grew quite fond.
She had a lisp and  a happy smile. We saw plenty of her for the
first month of our acquaintance,  then she died, quite quietly--of
heart trouble.

But you know, poor little Mrs Maidan--she was so gentle, so
young. She  cannot have been more than twenty-three and she had
a boy husband out in  Chitral not more than twenty-four, I believe.
Such young things ought to  have been left alone. Of course
Ashburnham could not leave her alone. I do  not believe that he
could. Why, even I, at this distance of time am aware  that I am a
little in love with her memory. I can't help smiling when I  think
suddenly of her--as you might at the thought of something wrapped 
carefully away in lavender, in some drawer, in some old house that
you have  long left. She was so--so submissive. Why, even to me
she had the air of  being submissive--to me that not the youngest
child will ever pay heed to.  Yes, this is the saddest story . . .

No, I cannot help wishing that Florence had left her alone--with
her playing  with adultery. I suppose it was; though she was such a
child that one has  the impression that she would hardly have
known how to spell such a word.  No, it was just
submissiveness--to the importunities, to the tempestuous  forces
that pushed that miserable fellow on to ruin. And I do not suppose 
that Florence really made much difference. If it had not been for
her that  Ashburnham left his allegiance for Mrs Maidan, then it
would have been some  other woman. But still, I do not know.
Perhaps the poor young thing would  have died--she was bound to
die, anyhow, quite soon--but she would have died  without having
to soak her noonday pillow with tears whilst Florence, below  the
window, talked to Captain Ashburnham about the Constitution of
the  United States. . . . Yes, it would have left a better taste in the
mouth if  Florence had let her die in peace. . . .

Leonora behaved better in a sense. She just boxed Mrs Maidan's
ears--yes,  she hit her, in an uncontrollable access of rage, a hard
blow on the side of  the cheek, in the corridor of the hotel, outside
Edward's rooms. It was  that, you know, that accounted for the
sudden, odd intimacy that sprang up  between Florence and Mrs
Ashburnham.  Because it was, of course, an odd intimacy. If you
look at it from the  outside nothing could have been more unlikely
than that Leonora, who is the  proudest creature on God's earth,
would have struck up an acquaintanceship  with two casual
Yankees whom she could not really have regarded as being  much
more than a carpet beneath her feet. You may ask what she had to
be  proud of. Well, she was a Powys married to an Ashburnham--I
suppose that  gave her the right to despise casual Americans as
long as she did it  unostentatiously. I don't know what anyone has
to be proud of. She might  have taken pride in her patience, in her
keeping her husband out of the  bankruptcy court. Perhaps she did.

At any rate that was how Florence got to know her. She came
round a screen  at the corner of the hotel corridor and found
Leonora with the gold key that  hung from her wrist caught in Mrs
Maidan's hair just before dinner. There  was not a single word
spoken. Little Mrs Maidan was very pale, with a red  mark down
her left cheek, and the key would not come out of her black hair. 
It was Florence who had to disentangle it, for Leonora was in such
a state  that she could not have brought herself to touch Mrs
Maidan without growing  sick.

And there was not a word spoken. You see, under those four
eyes--her own and  Mrs Maidan's--Leonora could just let herself go
as far as to box Mrs  Maidan's ears. But the moment a stranger
came along she pulled herself  wonderfully up. She was at first
silent and then, the moment the key was  disengaged by Florence
she was in a state to say: "So awkward of me . . . I  was just trying
to put the comb straight in Mrs Maidan's hair. . . ."

Mrs Maidan, however, was not a Powys married to an
Ashburnham; she was a  poor little O'Flaherty whose husband was
a boy of country parsonage origin.  So there was no mistaking the
sob she let go as she went desolately away  along the corridor. But
Leonora was still going to play up. She opened the  door of
Ashburnham's room quite ostentatiously, so that Florence should
hear  her address Edward in terms of intimacy and liking.
"Edward," she called.  But there was no Edward there.

You understand that there was no Edward there. It was then, for
the only  time of her career, that Leonora really compromised
herself--She exclaimed .  . . "How frightful! . . . Poor little Maisie!
. . ."

She caught herself up at that, but of course it was too late. It was a
queer  sort of affair. . . .

I want to do Leonora every justice. I love her very dearly for one
thing and  in this matter, which was certainly the ruin of my small
household  cockle-shell, she certainly tripped up. I do not
believe--and Leonora  herself does not believe--that poor little
Maisie Maidan was ever Edward's  mistress. Her heart was really
so bad that she would have succumbed to  anything like an
impassioned embrace. That is the plain English of it, and I 
suppose plain English is best. She was really what the other two,
for  reasons of their own, just pretended to be. Queer, isn't it? Like
one of  those sinister jokes that Providence plays upon one. Add to
this that I do  not suppose that Leonora would much have minded,
at any other moment, if Mrs  Maidan had been her husband's
mistress. It might have been a relief from  Edward's sentimental
gurglings over the lady and from the lady's submissive  acceptance
of those sounds. No, she would not have minded.

But, in boxing Mrs Maidan's ears, Leonora was just striking the
face of an  intolerable universe. For, that afternoon she had had a
frightfully painful  scene with Edward.

As far as his letters went, she claimed the right to open them when
she  chose. She arrogated to herself the right because Edward's
affairs were in  such a frightful state and he lied so about them that
she claimed the  privilege of having his secrets at her disposal.
There was not, indeed, any  other way, for the poor fool was too
ashamed of his lapses ever to make a  clean breast of anything. She
had to drag these things out of him.

It must have been a pretty elevating job for her. But that afternoon,
Edward  being on his bed for the hour and a half prescribed by the
Kur authorities,  she had opened a letter that she took to come
from a Colonel Hervey. They  were going to stay with him in
Linlithgowshire for the month of September  and she did not know
whether the date fixed would be the eleventh or the  eighteenth.
The address on this letter was, in handwriting, as like Colonel 
Hervey's as one blade of corn is like another. So she had at the
moment no  idea of spying on him.

But she certainly was. For she discovered that Edward
Ashburnham was paying  a blackmailer of whom she had never
heard something like three hundred  pounds a year . . . It was a
devil of a blow; it was like death; for she  imagined that by that
time she had really got to the bottom of her husband's  liabilities.
You see, they were pretty heavy. What had really smashed them 
up had been a perfectly common-place affair at Monte Carlo--an
affair with a  cosmopolitan harpy who passed for the mistress of a
Russian Grand Duke. She  exacted a twenty thousand pound pearl
tiara from him as the price of her  favours for a week or so. It
would have pipped him a good deal to have found  so much, and
he was not in the ordinary way a gambler. He might, indeed,  just
have found the twenty thousand and the not slight charges of a
week at  an hotel with the fair creature. He must have been worth
at that date five  hundred thousand dollars and a little over.  Well,
he must needs go to the tables and lose forty thousand pounds. . . . 
Forty thousand solid pounds, borrowed from sharks! And even
after that he  must--it was an imperative passion--enjoy the favours
of the lady. He got  them, of course, when it was a matter of solid
bargaining, for far less than  twenty thousand, as he might, no
doubt, have done from the first. I daresay  ten thousand dollars
covered the bill.  Anyhow, there was a pretty solid hole in a
fortune of a hundred thousand  pounds or so. And Leonora had to
fix things up; he would have run from  money-lender to
money-lender. And that was quite in the early days of her 
discovery of his infidelities--if you like to call them infidelities.
And  she discovered that one from public sources. God knows
what would have  happened if she had not discovered it from
public sources. I suppose he  would have concealed it from her
until they were penniless. But she was  able, by the grace of God,
to get hold of the actual lenders of the money,  to learn the exact
sums that were needed. And she went off to England.

Yes, she went right off to England to her attorney and his while he
was  still in the arms of his Circe--at Antibes, to which place they
had retired.  He got sick of the lady quite quickly, but not before
Leonora had had such  lessons in the art of business from her
attorney that she had her plan as  clearly drawn up as was ever that
of General Trochu for keeping the  Prussians out of Paris in 1870.
It was about as effectual at first, or it  seemed so.

That would have been, you know, in 1895, about nine years before
the date of  which I am talking--the date of Florence's getting her
hold over Leonora;  for that was what it amounted to. . . . Well,
Mrs Ashburnham had simply  forced Edward to settle all his
property upon her. She could force him to do  anything; in his
clumsy, good-natured, inarticulate way he was as frightened  of her
as of the devil. And he admired her enormously, and he was as
fond of  her as any man could be of any woman. She took
advantage of it to treat him  as if he had been a person whose
estates are being managed by the Court of  Bankruptcy. I suppose
it was the best thing for him.

Anyhow, she had no end of a job for the first three years or so.
Unexpected  liabilities kept on cropping up--and that afflicted fool
did not make it any  easier. You see, along with the passion of the
chase went a frame of mind  that made him be extraordinarily
ashamed of himself. You may not believe it,  but he really had
such a sort of respect for the chastity of Leonora's  imagination that
he hated--he was positively revolted at the thought that  she should
know that the sort of thing that he did existed in the world. So  he
would stick out in an agitated way against the accusation of ever
having  done anything. He wanted to preserve the virginity of his
wife's thoughts.  He told me that himself during the long walks we
had at the last--while the  girl was on the way to Brindisi.

So, of course, for those three years or so, Leonora had many
agitations. And  it was then that they really quarrelled.

Yes, they quarrelled bitterly. That seems rather extravagant. You
might have  thought that Leonora would be just calmly loathing
and he lachrymosely  contrite. But that was not it a bit . . . Along
with Edward's passions and  his shame for them went the violent
conviction of the duties of his  station--a conviction that was quite
unreasonably expensive. I trust I have  not, in talking of his
liabilities, given the impression that poor Edward  was a
promiscuous libertine. He was not; he was a sentimentalist. The 
servant girl in the Kilsyte case had been pretty, but mournful of 
appearance. I think that, when he had kissed her, he had desired
rather to  comfort her. And, if she had succumbed to his
blandishments I daresay he  would have set her up in a little house
in Portsmouth or Winchester and  would have been faithful to her
for four or five years. He was quite capable  of that.

No, the only two of his affairs of the heart that cost him money
were that  of the Grand Duke's mistress and that which was the
subject of the  blackmailing letter that Leonora opened. That had
been a quite passionate  affair with quite a nice woman. It had
succeeded the one with the Grand  Ducal lady. The lady was the
wife of a brother officer and Leonora had known  all about the
passion, which had been quite a real passion and had lasted  for
several years. You see, poor Edward's passions were quite logical
in  their progression upwards. They began with a servant, went on
to a courtesan  and then to a quite nice woman, very unsuitably
mated. For she had a quite  nasty husband who, by means of letters
and things, went on blackmailing poor  Edward to the tune of three
or four hundred a year--with threats of the  Divorce Court. And
after this lady came Maisie Maidan, and after poor Maisie  only
one more affair and then--the real passion of his life. His marriage 
with Leonora had been arranged by his parents and, though he
always admired  her immensely, he had hardly ever pretended to
be much more than tender to  her, though he desperately needed
her moral support, too. . . .

But his really trying liabilities were mostly in the nature of
generosities  proper to his station. He was, according to Leonora,
always remitting his  tenants' rents and giving the tenants to
understand that the reduction would  be permanent; he was always
redeeming drunkards who came before his  magisterial bench; he
was always trying to put prostitutes into respectable  places--and
he was a perfect maniac about children. I don't know how many 
ill-used people he did not pick up and provide with
careers--Leonora has  told me, but I daresay she exaggerated and
the figure seems so preposterous  that I will not put it down. All
these things, and the continuance of them  seemed to him to be his
duty--along with impossible subscriptions to  hospitals and Boy
Scouts and to provide prizes at cattle shows and  antivivisection
societies. . . .

Well, Leonora saw to it that most of these things were not
continued. They  could not possibly keep up Branshaw Manor at
that rate after the money had  gone to the Grand Duke's mistress.
She put the rents back at their old  figures; discharged the
drunkards from their homes, and sent all the  societies notice that
they were to expect no more subscriptions. To the  children, she
was more tender; nearly all of them she supported till the age  of
apprenticeship or domestic service. You see, she was childless
herself.

She was childless herself, and she considered herself to be to
blame. She  had come of a penniless branch of the Powys family,
and they had forced upon  her poor dear Edward without making
the stipulation that the children should  be brought up as Catholics.
And that, of course, was spiritual death to  Leonora. I have given
you a wrong impression if I have not made you see that  Leonora
was a woman of a strong, cold conscience, like all English 
Catholics. (I cannot, myself, help disliking this religion; there is
always,  at the bottom of my mind, in spite of Leonora, the feeling
of shuddering at  the Scarlet Woman, that filtered in upon me in
the tranquility of the little  old Friends' Meeting House in Arch
Street, Philadelphia.) So I do set down a  good deal of Leonora's
mismanagement of poor dear Edward's case to the  peculiarly
English form of her religion. Because, of course, the only thing  to
have done for Edward would have been to let him sink down until
he became  a tramp of gentlemanly address, having, maybe,
chance love affairs upon the  highways. He would have done so
much less harm; he would have been much less  agonized too. At
any rate, he would have had fewer chances of ruining and of 
remorse. For Edward was great at remorse.  But Leonora's English
Catholic conscience, her rigid principles, her  coldness, even her
very patience, were, I cannot help thinking, all wrong in  this
special case. She quite seriously and navely imagined that the
Church  of Rome disapproves of divorce; she quite seriously and
navely believed  that her church could be such a monstrous and
imbecile institution as to  expect her to take on the impossible job
of making Edward Ashburnham a  faithful husband. She had, as
the English would say, the Nonconformist  temperament. In the
United States of North America we call it the New  England
conscience. For, of course, that frame of mind has been driven in
on  the English Catholics. The centuries that they have gone
through--centuries  of blind and malignant oppression, of
ostracism from public employment, of  being, as it were, a small
beleagured garrison in a hostile country, and  therefore having to
act with great formality--all these things have combined  to
perform that conjuring trick. And I suppose that Papists in England
are  even technically Nonconformists.

Continental Papists are a dirty, jovial and unscrupulous crew. But
that, at  least, lets them be opportunists. They would have fixed
poor dear Edward up  all right. (Forgive my writing of these
monstrous things in this frivolous  manner. If I did not I should
break down and cry.) In Milan, say, or in  Paris, Leonora would
have had her marriage dissolved in six months for two  hundred
dollars paid in the right quarter. And Edward would have drifted 
about until he became a tramp of the kind I have suggested. Or he
would have  married a barmaid who would have made him such
frightful scenes in public  places and would so have torn out his
moustache and left visible signs upon  his face that he would have
been faithful to her for the rest of his days.  That was what he
wanted to redeem him. . . .

For, along with his passions and his shames there went the dread
of scenes  in public places, of outcry, of excited physical violence;
of publicity, in  short. Yes, the barmaid would have cured him.
And it would have been all the  better if she drank; he would have
been kept busy looking after her.

I know that I am right in this. I know it because of the Kilsyte case.
You  see, the servant girl that he then kissed was nurse in the
family of the  Nonconformist head of the county--whatever that
post may be called. And that  gentleman was so determined to ruin
Edward, who was the chairman of the Tory  caucus, or whatever it
is--that the poor dear sufferer had the very devil of  a time. They
asked questions about it in the House of Commons; they tried to 
get the Hampshire magistrates degraded; they suggested to the War
Ministry  that Edward was not the proper person to hold the King's
commission. Yes, he  got it hot and strong.

The result you have heard. He was completely cured of
philandering amongst  the lower classes. And that seemed a real
blessing to Leonora. It did not  revolt her so much to be
connected--it is a sort of connection--with people  like Mrs
Maidan, instead of with a little kitchenmaid.

In a dim sort of way, Leonora was almost contented when she
arrived at  Nauheim, that evening. . . .

She had got things nearly straight by the long years of scraping in
little  stations in Chitral and Burma--stations where living is cheap
in comparison  with the life of a county magnate, and where,
moreover, liaisons of one sort  or another are normal and
inexpensive too. So that, when Mrs Maidan came  along--and the
Maidan affair might have caused trouble out there because of  the
youth of the husband--Leonora had just resigned herself to coming
home.  With pushing and scraping and with letting Branshaw
Teleragh, and with  selling a picture and a relic of Charles I or so.
had got--and, poor dear,  she had never had a really decent dress to
her back in all those years and  years--she had got, as she
imagined, her poor dear husband back into much  the same
financial position as had been his before the mistress of the Grand 
Duke had happened along. And, of course, Edward himself had
helped her a  little on the financial side. He was a fellow that many
men liked. He was so  presentable and quite ready to lend you his
cigar puncher--that sort of  thing. So, every now and then some
financier whom he met about would give  him a good, sound,
profitable tip. And Leonora was never afraid of a bit of  a
gamble--English Papists seldom are, I do not know why.

So nearly all her investment turned up trumps, and Edward was
really in fit  case to reopen Branshaw Manor and once more to
assume his position in the  county. Thus Leonora had accepted
Maisie Maidan almost with  resignation--almost with a sigh of
relief. She really liked the poor  child--she had to like somebody.
And, at any rate, she felt she could trust  Maisie--she could trust
her not to rook Edward for several thousands a week,  for Maisie
had refused to accept so much as a trinket ring from him. It is  true
that Edward gurgled and raved about the girl in a way that she had 
never yet experienced. But that, too, was almost a relief. I think
she would  really have welcomed it if he could have come across
the love of his life.  It would have given her a rest.

And there could not have been anyone better than poor little Mrs
Maidan; she  was so ill she could not want to be taken on
expensive jaunts. . . . It was  Leonora herself who paid Maisie's
expenses to Nauheim. She handed over the  money to the boy
husband, for Maisie would never have allowed it; but the  husband
was in agonies of fear. Poor devil!

I fancy that, on the voyage from India, Leonora was as happy as
ever she had  been in her life. Edward was wrapped up,
completely, in his girl--he was  almost like a father with a child,
trotting about with rugs and physic and  things, from deck to deck.
He behaved, however, with great circumspection,  so that nothing
leaked through to the other passengers. And Leonora had  almost
attained to the attitude of a mother towards Mrs Maidan. So it had 
looked very well--the benevolent, wealthy couple of good people,
acting as  saviours to the poor, dark-eyed, dying young thing. And
that attitude of  Leonora's towards Mrs Maidan no doubt partly
accounted for the smack in the  face. She was hitting a naughty
child who had been stealing chocolates at an  inopportune
moment.  It was certainly an inopportune moment. For, with the
opening of that  blackmailing letter from that injured brother
officer, all the old terrors  had redescended upon Leonora. Her
road had again seemed to stretch out  endless; she imagined that
there might be hundreds and hundreds of such  things that Edward
was concealing from her--that they might necessitate more 
mortgagings, more pawnings of bracelets, more and always more
horrors. She  had spent an excruciating afternoon. The matter was
one of a divorce case,  of course, and she wanted to avoid publicity
as much as Edward did, so that  she saw the necessity of
continuing the payments. And she did not so much  mind that.
They could find three hundred a year. But it was the horror of 
there being more such obligations.

She had had no conversation with Edward for many years--none
that went  beyond the mere arrangements for taking trains or
engaging servants. But  that afternoon she had to let him have it.
And he had been just the same as  ever. It was like opening a book
after a decade to find the words the same.  He had the same
motives. He had not wished to tell her about the case  because he
had not wished her to sully her mind with the idea that there was 
such a thing as a brother officer who could be a blackmailer--and
he had  wanted to protect the credit of his old light of love. That
lady was  certainly not concerned with her husband. And he swore,
and swore, and  swore, that there was nothing else in the world
against him. She did not  believe him.

He had done it once too often--and she was wrong for the first
time, so that  he acted a rather creditable part in the matter. For he
went right straight  out to the post-office and spent several hours in
coding a telegram to his  solicitor, bidding that hard-headed man
to threaten to take out at once a  warrant against the fellow who
was on his track. He said afterwards that it  was a bit too thick on
poor old Leonora to be ballyragged any more. That was  really the
last of his outstanding accounts, and he was ready to take his 
personal chance of the Divorce Court if the blackmailer turned
nasty. He  would face it out--the publicity, the papers, the whole
bally show. Those  were his simple words. . . .

He had made, however, the mistake of not telling Leonora where
he was going,  so that, having seen him go to his room to fetch the
code for the telegram,  and seeing, two hours later, Maisie Maidan
come out of his room, Leonora  imagined that the two hours she
had spent in silent agony Edward had spent  with Maisie Maidan
in his arms. That seemed to her to be too much.  As a matter of
fact, Maisie's being in Edward's room had been the result,  partly
of poverty, partly of pride, partly of sheer innocence. She could 
not, in the first place, afford a maid; she refrained as much as
possible  from sending the hotel servants on errands, since every
penny was of  importance to her, and she feared to have to pay
high tips at the end of her  stay. Edward had lent her one of his
fascinating cases contaiing fifteen  different sizes of scisssors, and,
having seen from her window, his  departure for the post-office,
she had taken the opportunity of returning  the case. She could not
see why she should not, though she felt a certain  remorse at the
thought that she had kissed the pillows of his bed. That was  the
way it took her.

But Leonora could see that, without the shadow of a doubt, the
incident gave  Florence a hold over her. It let Florence into things
and Florence was the  only created being who had any idea that the
Ashburnhams were not just good  people with nothing to their
tails. She determined at once, not so much to  give Florence the
privilege of her intimacy--which would have been the  payment of
a kind of blackmail--as to keep Florence under observation until 
she could have demonstrated to Florence that she was not in the
least  jealous of poor Maisie. So that was why she had entered the
dining-room arm  in arm with my wife, and why she had so
markedly planted herself at our  table. She never left us, indeed,
for a minute that night, except just to  run up to Mrs Maidan's
room to beg her pardon and to beg her also to let  Edward take her
very markedly out into the gardens that night. She said  herself,
when Mrs Maidan came rather wistfully down into the lounge
where we  were all sitting: "Now, Edward, get up and take Maisie
to the Casino. I want  Mrs Dowell to tell me all about the families
in Connecticut who came from  Fordingbridge." For it had been
discovered that Florence came of a line that  had actually owned
Branshaw Teleragh for two centuries before the  Ashburnhams
came there. And there she sat with me in that hall, long after 
Florence had gone to bed, so that I might witness her gay reception
of that  pair. She could play up.

And that enables me to fix exactly the day of our going to the town
of  M----. For it was the very day poor Mrs Maidan died. We found
her dead when  we got back--pretty awful, that, when you come to
figure out what it all  means. . . .

At any rate the measure of my relief when Leonora said that she
was an Irish  Catholic gives you the measure of my affection for
that couple. It was an  affection so intense that even to this day I
cannot think of Edward without  sighing. I do not believe that I
could have gone on any more with them. I  was getting too tired.
And I verily believe, too, if my suspicion that  Leonora was jealous
of Florence had been the reason she gave for her  outburst I should
have turned upon Florence with the maddest kind of rage. 
Jealousy would have been incurable. But Florence's mere silly
jibes at the  Irish and at the Catholics could be apologized out of
existence. And that I  appeared to fix up in two minutes or so.

She looked at me for a long time rather fixedly and queerly while I
was  doing it. And at last I worked myself up to saying:

"Do accept the situation. I confess that I do not like your religion.
But I  like you so intensely. I don't mind saying that I have never
had anyone to  be really fond of, and I do not believe that anyone
has ever been fond of  me, as I believe you really to be."

"Oh, I'm fond enough of you," she said. "Fond enough to say that I
wish  every man was like you. But there are others to be
considered." She was  thinking, as a matter of fact, of poor Maisie.
She picked a little piece of  pellitory out of the breast-high wall in
front of us. She chafed it for a  long minute between her finger and
thumb, then she threw it over the coping.

"Oh, I accept the situation," she said at last, "if you can."

VI I REMEMBER laughing at the phrase, "accept the situation",
which she seemed  to repeat with a gravity too intense. I said to her
something like:

"It's hardly as much as that. I mean, that I must claim the liberty of
a  free American citizen to think what I please about your
co-religionists. And  I suppose that Florence must have liberty to
think what she pleases and to  say what politeness allows her to
say."

"She had better," Leonora answered, "not say one single word
against my  people or my faith."  It struck me at the time, that there
was an unusual, an almost threatening,  hardness in her voice. It
was almost as if she were trying to convey to  Florence, through
me, that she would seriously harm my wife if Florence went  to
something that was an extreme. Yes, I remember thinking at the
time that  it was almost as if Leonora were saying, through me to
Florence:

"You may outrage me as you will; you may take all that I
personally possess,  but do not you care to say one single thing in
view of the situation that  that will set up--against the faith that
makes me become the doormat for  your feet."

But obviously, as I saw it, that could not be her meaning. Good
people, be  they ever so diverse in creed, do not threaten each
other. So that I read  Leonora's words to mean just no more than: 
"It would be better if Florence said nothing at all against my 
co-religionists, because it is a point that I am touchy about."

That was the hint that, accordingly, I conveyed to Florence when,
shortly  afterwards, she and Edward came down from the tower.
And I want you to  understand that, from that moment until after
Edward and the girl and  Florence were all dead together, I had
never the remotest glimpse, not the  shadow of a suspicion, that
there was anything wrong, as the saying is. For  five minutes, then,
I entertained the possibility that Leonora might be  jealous; but
there was never another flicker in that flame-like personality.  How
in the world should I get it?

For, all that time, I was just a male sick nurse. And what chance
had I  against those three hardened gamblers, who were all in
league to conceal  their hands from me? What earthly chance?
They were three to one--and they  made me happy. Oh God, they
made me so happy that I doubt if even paradise,  that shall smooth
out all temporal wrongs, shall ever give me the like. And  what
could they have done better, or what could they have done that
could  have been worse? I don't know. . . .

I suppose that, during all that time I was a deceived husband and
that  Leonora was pimping for Edward. That was the cross that she
had to take up  during her long Calvary of a life. . . .

You ask how it feels to be a deceived husband. Just Heavens, I do
not know.  It feels just nothing at all. It is not Hell, certainly it is
not  necessarily Heaven. So I suppose it is the intermediate stage.
What do they  call it? Limbo. No, I feel nothing at all about that.
They are dead; they  have gone before their Judge who, I hope,
will open to them the springs of  His compassion. It is not my
business to think about it. It is simply my  business to say, as
Leonora's people say: "Requiem aeternam dona eis, Do  mine, et
lux perpetua luceat eis. In memoria aeterna erit. . . ." But what 
were they? The just? The unjust? God knows! I think that the pair
of them  were only poor wretches, creeping over this earth in the
shadow of an  eternal wrath. It is very terrible. . . .

It is almost too terrible, the picture of that judgement, as it appears
to  me sometimes, at nights. It is probably the suggestion of some
picture that  I have seen somewhere. But upon an immense plain,
suspended in mid-air, I  seem to see three figures, two of them
clasped close in an intense embrace,  and one intolerably solitary.
lt is in black and white, my picture of that  judgement, an etching,
perhaps; only I cannot tell an etching from a  photographic
reproduction. And the immense plain is the hand of God, 
stretching out for miles and miles, with great spaces above it and
below it.  And they are in the sight of God, and it is Florence that
is alone. . . .  And, do you know, at the thought of that intense
solitude I feel an  overwhelming desire to rush forward and
comfort her. You cannot, you see,  have acted as nurse to a person
for twelve years without wishing to go on  nursing them, even
though you hate them with the hatred of the adder, and  even in the
palm of God. But, in the nights, with that vision of judgement 
before me, I know that I hold myself back. For I hate Florence. I
hate  Florence with such a hatred that I would not spare her an
eternity of  loneliness. She need not have done what she did. She
was an American, a New  Englander. She had not the hot passions
of these Europeans. She cut out that  poor imbecile of an
Edward--and I pray God that he is really at peace,  clasped close in
the arms of that poor, poor girl! And, no doubt, Maisie  Maidan
will find her young husband again, and Leonora will burn, clear
and  serene, a northern light and one of the archangels of God. And
me. . . .  Well, perhaps, they will find me an elevator to run. . . .
But Florence. . .  .

She should not have done it. She should not have done it. It was
playing it  too low down. She cut out poor dear Edward from sheer
vanity; she meddled  between him and Leonora from a sheer,
imbecile spirit of district visiting.  Do you understand that, whilst
she was Edward's mistress, she was  perpetually trying to reunite
him to his wife? She would gabble on to  Leonora about
forgiveness--treating the subject from the bright, American  point
of view. And Leonora would treat her like the whore she was.
Once she  said to Florence in the early morning:

"You come to me straight out of his bed to tell me that that is my
proper  place. I know it, thank you."

But even that could not stop Florence. She went on saying that it
was her  ambition to leave this world a little brighter by the
passage of her brief  life, and how thankfully she would leave
Edward, whom she thought she had  brought to a right frame of
mind, if Leonora would only give him a chance.  He needed, she
said, tenderness beyond anything.

And Leonora would answer--for she put up with this outrage for 
years--Leonora, as I understand, would answer something like:

"Yes, you would give him up. And you would go on writing to
each other in  secret, and committing adultery in hired rooms. I
know the pair of you, you  know. No. I prefer the situation as it is." 
Half the time Florence would ignore Leonora's remarks. She would
think they  were not quite ladylike. The other half of the time she
would try to  persuade Leonora that her love for Edward was quite
spiritual--on account of  her heart. Once she said:

"If you can believe that of Maisie Maidan, as you say you do, why
cannot you  believe it of me?"  Leonora was, I understand, doing
her hair at that time in front of the  mirror in her bedroom. And she
looked round at Florence, to whom she did not  usually vouchsafe
a glance,--she looked round coolly and calmly, and said:

"Never do you dare to mention Mrs Maidan's name again. You
murdered her. You  and I murdered her between us. I am as much
a scoundrel as you. I don't like  to be reminded of it."

Florence went off at once into a babble of how could she have hurt
a person  whom she hardly knew, a person whom with the best
intentions, in pursuance  of her efforts to leave the world a little
brighter, she had tried to save  from Edward. That was how she
figured it out to herself. She really thought  that. . . . So Leonora
said patiently:

"Very well, just put it that I killed her and that it's a painful
subject.  One does not like to think that one had killed someone.
Naturally not. I  ought never to have brought her from India."  And
that, indeed, is exactly how Leonora looked at it. It is stated a little 
baldly, but Leonora was always a great one for bald statements.

What had happened on the day of our jaunt to the ancient city of
M---- had  been this:

Leonora, who had been even then filled with pity and contrition for
the poor  child, on returning to our hotel had gone straight to Mrs
Maidan's room. She  had wanted just to pet her. And she had
perceived at first only, on the  clear, round table covered with red
velvet, a letter addressed to her. It  ran something like:

"Oh, Mrs Ashburnham, how could you have done it? I trusted you
so. You never  talked to me about me and Edward, but I trusted
you. How could you buy me  from my husband? I have just heard
how you have--in the hall they were  talking about it, Edward and
the American lady. You paid the money for me to  come here. Oh,
how could you? How could you? I am going straight back to 
Bunny. . . ."  Bunny was Mrs Maidan's husband.

And Leonora said that, as she went on reading the letter, she had,
without  looking round her, a sense that that hotel room was
cleared, that there were  no papers on the table, that there were no
clothes on the hooks, and that  there was a strained silence--a
silence, she said, as if there were  something in the room that
drank up such sounds as there were. She had to  fight against that
feeling, whilst she read the postscript of the letter.

"I did not know you wanted me for an adulteress," the postscript
began. The  poor child was hardly literate. "It was surely not right
of you and I never  wanted to be one. And I heard Edward call me
a poor little rat to the  American lady. He always called me a little
rat in private, and I did not  mind. But, if he called me it to her, I
think he does not love me any more.  Oh, Mrs Ashburnham, you
knew the world and I knew nothing. I thought it  would be all right
if you thought it could, and I thought you would not have  brought
me if you did not, too. You should not have done it, and we out of 
the same convent. . . ."

Leonora said that she screamed when she read that.

And then she saw that Maisie's boxes were all packed, and she
began a search  for Mrs Maidan herself--all over the hotel. The
manager said that Mrs Maidan  had paid her bill, and had gone up
to the station to ask the  Reiseverkehrsbureau to make her out a
plan for her immediate return to  Chitral. He imagined that he had
seen her come back, but he was not quite  certain. No one in the
large hotel had bothered his head about the child.  And she,
wandering solitarily in the hall, had no doubt sat down beside a 
screen that had Edward and Florence on the other side. I never
heard then or  after what had passed between that precious couple.
I fancy Florence was  just about beginning her cutting out of poor
dear Edward by addressing to  him some words of friendly
warning as to the ravages he might be making in  the girl's heart.
That would be the sort of way she would begin. And Edward 
would have sentimentally assured her that there was nothing in it;
that  Maisie was just a poor little rat whose passage to Nauheim
his wife had paid  out of her own pocket. That would have been
enough to do the trick.

For the trick was pretty efficiently done. Leonora, with panic
growing and  with contrition very large in her heart, visited every
one of the public  rooms of the hotel--the dining-room, the lounge,
the schreibzimmer, the  winter garden. God knows what they
wanted with a winter garden in an hotel  that is only open from
May till October. But there it was. And then Leonora  ran--yes, she
ran up the stairs--to see if Maisie had not returned to her  rooms.
She had determined to take that child right away from that hideous 
place. It seemed to her to be all unspeakable. I do not mean to say
that she  was not quite cool about it. Leonora was always Leonora.
But the cold  justice of the thing demanded that she should play
the part of mother to  this child who had come from the same
convent. She figured it out to amount  to that. She would leave
Edward to Florence and to me--and she would devote  all her time
to providing that child with an atmosphere of love until she  could
be returned to her poor young husband. It was naturally too late.

She had not cared to look round Maisie's rooms at first. Now, as
soon as she  came in, she perceived, sticking out beyond the bed, a
small pair of feet in  high-heeled shoes. Maisie had died in the
effort to strap up a great  portmanteau. She had died so grotesquely
that her little body had fallen  forward into the trunk, and it had
closed upon her, like the jaws of a  gigantic alligator. The key was
in her hand. Her dark hair, like the hair of  a Japanese, had come
down and covered her body and her face.

Leonora lifted her up--she was the merest featherweight--and laid
her on the  bed with her hair about her. She was smiling, as if she
had just scored a  goal in a hockey match. You understand she had
not committed suicide. Her  heart had just stopped. I saw her, with
the long lashes on the cheeks, with  the smile about the lips, with
the flowers all about her. The stem of a  white lily rested in her
hand so that the spike of flowers was upon her  shoulder. She
looked like a bride in the sunlight of the mortuary candles  that
were all about her, and the white coifs of the two nuns that knelt at 
her feet with their faces hidden might have been two swans that
were to bear  her away to kissing-kindness land, or wherever it is.
Leonora showed her to  me. She would not let either of the others
see her. She wanted, you know, to  spare poor dear Edward's
feelings. He never could bear the sight of a  corpse. And, since she
never gave him an idea that Maisie had written to  her, he
imagined that the death had been the most natural thing in the 
world. He soon got over it. Indeed, it was the one affair of his
about which  he never felt much remorse.

PART II 

I 

THE death of Mrs Maidan occurred on the 4th of August, 1904.
And then  nothing happened until the 4th of August, 1913. There is
the curious  coincidence of dates, but I do not know whether that is
one of those  sinister, as if half jocular and altogether merciless
proceedings on the  part of a cruel Providence that we call a
coincidence. Because it may just  as well have been the
superstitious mind of Florence that forced her to  certain acts, as if
she had been hypnotized. It is, however, certain that  the 4th of
August always proved a significant date for her. To begin with, 
she was born on the 4th of August. Then, on that date, in the year
1899, she  set out with her uncle for the tour round the world in
company with a young  man called Jimmy. But that was not
merely a coincidence. Her kindly old  uncle, with the supposedly
damaged heart, was in his delicate way, offering  her, in this trip, a
birthday present to celebrate her coming of age. Then,  on the 4th
of August, 1900, she yielded to an action that certainly coloured 
her whole life--as well as mine. She had no luck. She was probably
offering  herself a birthday present that morning. . . .  On the 4th of
August, 1901, she married me, and set sail for Europe in a  great
gale of wind--the gale that affected her heart. And no doubt there, 
again, she was offering herself a birthday gift--the birthday gift of
my  miserable life. It occurs to me that I have never told you
anything about my  marriage. That was like this: I have told you, as
I think, that I first met  Florence at the Stuyvesants', in Fourteenth
Street. And, from that moment, I  determined with all the
obstinacy of a possibly weak nature, if not to make  her mine, at
least to marry her. I had no occupation--I had no business  affairs. I
simply camped down there in Stamford, in a vile hotel, and just 
passed my days in the house, or on the verandah of the Misses
Hurlbird. The  Misses Hurlbird, in an odd, obstinate way, did not
like my presence. But  they were hampered by the national
manners of these occasions. Florence had  her own sitting-room.
She could ask to it whom she liked, and I simply  walked into that
apartment. I was as timid as you will, but in that matter I  was like
a chicken that is determined to get across the road in front of an 
automobile. I would walk into Florence's pretty, little,
old-fashioned room,  take off my hat, and sit down.

Florence had, of course, several other fellows, too--strapping
young New  Englanders, who worked during the day in New York
and spent only the  evenings in the village of their birth. And, in
the evenings, they would  march in on Florence with almost as
much determination as I myself showed.  And I am bound to say
that they were received with as much disfavour as was  my
portion--from the Misses Hurlbird. . . .

They were curious old creatures, those two. It was almost as if they
were  members of an ancient family under some curse--they were
so gentlewomanly,  so proper, and they sighed so. Sometimes I
would see tears in their eyes. I  do not know that my courtship of
Florence made much progress at first.  Perhaps that was because it
took place almost entirely during the daytime,  on hot afternoons,
when the clouds of dust hung like fog, right up as high  as the tops
of the thin-leaved elms. The night, I believe, is the proper  season
for the gentle feats of love, not a Connecticut July afternoon, when 
any sort of proximity is an almost appalling thought. But, if I never
so  much as kissed Florence, she let me discover very easily, in the
course of a  fortnight, her simple wants. And I could supply those
wants. . . .

She wanted to marry a gentleman of leisure; she wanted a
European  establishment. She wanted her husband to have an
English accent, an income  of fifty thousand dollars a year from
real estate and no ambitions to  increase that income. And--she
faintly hinted--she did not want much  physical passion in the
affair. Americans, you know, can envisage such  unions without
blinking.

She gave cut this information in floods of bright talk--she would
pop a  little bit of it into comments over a view of the Rialto,
Venice, and,  whilst she was brightly describing Balmoral Castle,
she would say that her  ideal husband would he one who could get
her received at the British Court.  She had spent, it seemed, two
months in Great Britain--seven weeks in  touring from Stratford to
Strathpeffer, and one as paying guest in an old  English family near
Ledbury, an impoverished, but still stately family,  called
Bagshawe. They were to have spent two months more in that
tranquil  bosom, but inopportune events, apparently in her uncle's
business, had  caused their rather hurried return to Stamford. The
young man called Jimmy  had remained in Europe to perfect his
knowledge of that continent. He  certainly did: he was most useful
to us afterwards.

But the point that came out--that there was no mistaking--was that
Florence  was coldly and calmly determined to take no look at any
man who could not  give her a European settlement. Her glimpse
of English home life had  effected this. She meant, on her
marriage, to have a year in Paris, and then  to have her husband
buy some real estate in the neighbourhood of  Fordingbridge, from
which place the Hurlbirds had come in the year 1688. On  the
strength of that she was going to take her place in the ranks of
English  county society. That was fixed.

I used to feel mightily elevated when I considered these details, for
I  could not figure out that amongst her acquaintances in Stamford
there was  any fellow that would fill the bill. The most of them
were not as wealthy as  I, and those that were were not the type to
give up the fascinations of Wall  Street even for the protracted
companionship of Florence. But nothing really  happened during
the month of July. On the 1st of August Florence apparently  told
her aunts that she intended to marry me.

She had not told me so, but there was no doubt about the aunts,
for, on that  afternoon, Miss Florence Hurlbird, Senior, stopped me
on my way to  Florence's sitting-room and took me, agitatedly, into
the parlour. It was a  singular interview, in that old-fashioned
colonial room, with the  spindle-legged furniture, the silhouettes,
the miniatures, the portrait of  General Braddock, and the smell of
lavender. You see, the two poor maiden  ladies were in
agonies--and they could not say one single thing direct. They 
would almost wring their hands and ask if I had considered such a
thing as  different temperaments. I assure you they were almost
affectionate,  concerned for me even, as if Florence were too
bright for my solid and  serious virtues.

For they had discovered in me solid and serious virtues. That
might have  been because I had once dropped the remark that I
preferred General Braddock  to General Washington. For the
Hurlbirds had backed the losing side in the  War of Independence,
and had been seriously impoverished and quite  efficiently
oppressed for that reason. The Misses Hurlbird could never  forget
it.

Nevertheless they shuddered at the thought of a European career
for myself  and Florence. Each of them really wailed when they
heard that that was what  I hoped to give their niece. That may
have been partly because they regarded  Europe as a sink of
iniquity, where strange laxities prevailed. They thought  the
Mother Country as Erastian as any other. And they carried their
protests  to extraordinary lengths, for them. . . .

They even, almost, said that marriage was a sacrament; but neither
Miss  Florence nor Miss Emily could quite bring herself to utter
the word. And  they almost brought themselves to say that
Florence's early life had been  characterized by
flirtations--something of that sort.

I know I ended the interview by saying:

"I don't care. If Florence has robbed a bank I am going to marry her
and  take her to Europe."  And at that Miss Emily wailed and
fainted. But Miss Florence, in spite of  the state of her sister, threw
herself on my neck and cried out:  "Don't do it, John. Don't do it.
You're a good young man," and she added,  whilst I was getting out
of the room to send Florenc to her aunt's rescue:

"We ought to tell you more. But she's our dear sister's child."

Florence, I remember, received me with a chalk-pale face and the 
exclamation:

"Have those old cats been saying anything against me?" But I
assured her  that they had not and hurried her into the room of her
strangely afflicted  relatives. I had really forgotten all about that
exclamation of Florence's  until this moment. She treated me so
very well--with such tact--that, if I  ever thought of it afterwards I
put it down to her deep affection for me.

And that evening, when I went to fetch her for a buggy-ride, she
had  disappeared. I did not lose any time. I went into New York
and engaged  berths on the "Pocahontas", that was to sail on the
evening of the fourth of  the month, and then, returning to
Stamford, I tracked out, in the course of  the day, that Florence had
been driven to Rye Station. And there I found  that she had taken
the cars to Waterbury. She had, of course, gone to her  uncle's. The
old man received me with a stony, husky face. I was not to see 
Florence; she was ill; she was keeping her room. And, from
something that he  let drop--an odd Biblical phrase that I have
forgotten --I gathered that all  that family simply did not intend her
to marry ever in her life.

I procured at once the name of the nearest minister and a rope
ladder--you  have no idea how primitively these matters were
arranged in those days in  the United States. I daresay that may be
so still. And at one o'clock in the  morning of the 4th of August I
was standing in Florence's bedroom. I was so  one-minded in my
purpose that it never struck me there was anything improper  in
being, at one o'clock in the morning, in Florence's bedroom. I just 
wanted to wake her up. She was not, however, asleep. She
expected me, and  her relatives had only just left her. She received
me with an embrace of a  warmth. . . . Well, it was the first time I
had ever been embraced by a  woman--and it was the last when a
woman's embrace has had in it any warmth  for me. . . .  I suppose
it was my own fault, what followed. At any rate, I was in such a 
hurry to get the wedding over, and was so afraid of her relatives
finding me  there, that I must have received her advances with a
certain amount of  absence of mind. I was out of that room and
down the ladder in under half a  minute. She kept me waiting at
the foot an unconscionable time--it was  certainly three in the
morning before we knocked up that minister. And I  think that that
wait was the only sign Florence ever showed of having a 
conscience as far as I was concerned, unless her lying for some
moments in  my arms was also a sign of conscience. I fancy that, if
I had shown warmth  then, she would have acted the proper wife to
me, or would have put me back  again. But, because I acted like a
Philadelphia gentleman, she made me, I  suppose, go through with
the part of a male nurse. Perhaps she thought that  I should not
mind.

After that, as I gather, she had not any more remorse. She was only
anxious  to carry out her plans. For, just before she came down the
ladder, she  called me to the top of that grotesque implement that I
went up and down  like a tranquil jumping-jack. I was perfectly
collected. She said to me with  a certain fierceness:

"It is determined that we sail at four this afternoon? You are not
lying  about having taken berths?"

I understood that she would naturally be anxious to get away from
the  neighbourhood of her apparently insane relatives, so that I
readily excused  her for thinking that I should be capable of lying
about such a thing. I  made it, therefore, plain to her that it was my
fixed determination to sail  by the "Pocahontas". She said then--it
was a moonlit morning, and she was  whispering in my ear whilst I
stood on the ladder. The hills that surround  Waterbury showed,
extraordinarily tranquil, around the villa. She said,  almost coldly:

"I wanted to know, so as to pack my trunks." And she added: "I
may be ill,  you know. I guess my heart is a little like Uncle
Hurlbird's. It runs in  families."

I whispered that the "Pocahontas" was an extraordinarily steady
boat. . . .

Now I wonder what had passed through Florence's mind during the
two hours  that she had kept me waiting at the foot of the ladder. I
would give not a  little to know. Till then, I fancy she had had no
settled plan in her mind.  She certainly never mentioned her heart
till that time. Perhaps the renewed  sight of her Uncle Hurlbird had
given her the idea. Certainly her Aunt  Emily, who had come over
with her to Waterbury, would have rubbed into her,  for hours and
hours, the idea that any accentuated discussions would kill  the old
gentleman. That would recall to her mind all the safeguards
against  excitement with which the poor silly old gentleman had
been hedged in during  their trip round the world. That, perhaps,
put it into her head. Still, I  believe there was some remorse on my
account, too. Leonora told me that  Florence said there was--for
Leonora knew all about it, and once went so far  as to ask her how
she could do a thing so infamous. She excused herself on  the
score of an overmastering passion. Well, I always say that an 
overmastering passion is a good excuse for feelings. You cannot
help them.  And it is a good excuse for straight actions--she might
have bolted with the  fellow, before or after she married me. And,
if they had not enough money to  get along with, they might have
cut their throats, or sponged on her family,  though, of course,
Florence wanted such a lot that it would have suited her  very
badly to have for a husband a clerk in a dry-goods store, which was 
what old Hurlbird would have made of that fellow. He hated him.
No, I do not  think that there is much excuse for Florence.

God knows. She was a frightened fool, and she was fantastic, and I
suppose  that, at that time, she really cared for that imbecile. He
certainly didn't  care for her. Poor thing. . . . At any rate, after I had
assured her that  the "Pocahontas" was a steady ship, she just said: 
"You'll have to look after me in certain ways--like Uncle Hurlbird
is looked  after. I will tell you how to do it." And then she stepped
over the sill, as  if she were stepping on board a boat. I suppose she
had burnt hers!

I had, no doubt, eye-openers enough. When we re-entered the
Hurlbird mansion  at eight o'clock the Hurlbirds were just
exhausted. Florence had a hard,  triumphant air. We had got
married about four in the morning and had sat  about in the woods
above the town till then, listening to a mocking-bird  imitate an old
tom-cat. So I guess Florence had not found getting married to  me
a very stimulating process. I had not found anything much more
inspiring  to say than how glad I was, with variations. I think I was
too dazed. Well,  the Hurlbirds were too dazed to say much. We
had breakfast together, and  then Florence went to pack her grips
and things. Old Hurlbird took the  opportunity to read me a
full-blooded lecture, in the style of an American  oration, as to the
perils for young American girlhood lurking in the  European
jungle. He said that Paris was full of snakes in the grass, of  which
he had had bitter experience. He concluded, as they always do,
poor,  dear old things, with the aspiration that all American women
should one day  be sexless--though that is not the way they put it. .
. .

Well, we made the ship all right by one-thirty--an there was a
tempest  blowing. That helped Florence a good deal. For we were
not ten minutes out  from Sandy Hook before Florence went down
into her cabin and her heart took  her. An agitated stewardess came
running up to me, and I went running down.  I got my directions
how to behave to my wife. Most of them came from her,  though it
was the ship doctor who discreetly suggested to me that I had 
better refrain from manifestations of affection. I was ready
enough.  I was, of course, full of remorse. It occurred to me that
her heart was the  reason for the Hurlbirds' mysterious desire to
keep their youngest and  dearest unmarried. Of course, they would
be too refined to put the motive  into words. They were old stock
New Englanders. They would not want to have  to suggest that a
husband must not kiss the back of his wife's neck. They  would not
like to suggest that he might, for the matter of that. I wonder, 
though, how Florence got the doctor to enter the conspiracy--the
several  doctors.

Of course her heart squeaked a bit--she had the same configuration
of the  lungs as her Uncle Hurlbird. And, in his company, she must
have heard a  great deal of heart talk from specialists. Anyhow, she
and they tied me  pretty well down--and Jimmy, of course, that
dreary boy--what in the world  did she see in him? He was
lugubrious, silent, morose. He had no talent as a  painter. He was
very sallow and dark, and he never shaved sufficiently. He  met us
at Havre, and he proceeded to make himself useful for the next
two  years, during which he lived in our flat in Paris, whether we
were there or  not. He studied painting at Julien's, or some such
place. . . .

That fellow had his hands always in the pockets of his odious, 
square-shouldered, broad-hipped, American coats, and his dark
eyes were  always full of ominous appearances. He was, besides,
too fat. Why, I was  much the better man. . . .

And I daresay Florence would have given me the better. She
showed signs of  it. I think, perhaps, the enigmatic smile with
which she used to look back  at me over her shoulder when she
went into the bathing place was a sort of  invitation. I have
mentioned that. It was as if she were saying: "I am going  in here. I
am going to stand so stripped and white and straight--and you are 
a man. . . ." Perhaps it was that. . . .

No, she cannot have liked that fellow long. He looked like sallow
putty. I  understand that he had been slim and dark and very
graceful at the time of  her first disgrace. But, loafing about in
Paris, on her pocket-money and on  the allowance that old
Hurlbird made him to keep out of the United States,  had given
him a stomach like a man of forty, and dyspeptic irritation on top 
of it.  God, how they worked me! It was those two between them
who really elaborated  the rules. I have told you something about
them--how I had to head  conversations, for all those eleven years,
off such topics as love, poverty,  crime, and so on. But, looking
over what I have written, I see that I have  unintentionally misled
you when I said that Florence was never out of my  sight. Yet that
was the impression that I really had until just now. When I  come
to think of it she was out of my sight most of the time.

You see, that fellow impressed upon me that what Florence needed
most of all  were sleep and privacy. I must never enter her room
without knocking, or her  poor little heart might flutter away to its
doom. He said these things with  his lugubrious croak, and his
black eyes like a crow's, so that I seemed to  see poor Florence die
ten times a day--a little, pale, frail corpse. Why, I  would as soon
have thought of entering her room without her permission as of 
burgling a church. I would sooner have committed that crime. I
would  certainly have done it if I had thought the state of her heart
demanded the  sacrilege. So at ten o'clock at night the door closed
upon Florence, who had  gently, and, as if reluctantly, backed up
that fellow's recommendations; and  she would wish me good
night as if she were a cinquecento Italian lady  saying good-bye to
her lover. And at ten o'clock of the next morning there  she would
come out the door of her room as fresh as Venus rising from any of 
the couches that are mentioned in Greek legends.

Her room door was locked because she was nervous about thieves;
but an  electric contrivance on a cord was understood to be
attached to her little  wrist. She had only to press a bulb to raise
the house. And I was provided  with an axe--an axe!--great gods,
with which to break down her door in case  she ever failed to
answer my knock, after I knocked really loud several  times. It was
pretty well thought out, you see.

What wasn't so well thought out were the ultimate
consequences--our being  tied to Europe. For that young man
rubbed it so well into me that Florence  would die if she crossed
the Channel--he impressed it so fully on my mind  that, when later
Florence wanted to go to Fordingbridge, I cut the proposal 
short--absolutely short, with a curt no. It fixed her and it frightened
her.  I was even backed up by all the doctors. I seemed to have had
endless  interviews with doctor after doctor, cool, quiet men, who
would ask, in  reasonable tones, whether there was any reason for
our going to England--any  special reason. And since I could not
see any special reason, they would  give the verdict: "Better not,
then." I daresay they were honest enough, as  things go. They
probably imagined that the mere associations of the steamer  might
have effects on Florence's nerves. That would be enough, that and
a  conscientious desire to keep our money on the Continent.

It must have rattled poor Florence pretty considerably, for you see,
the  main idea--the only main idea of her heart, that was otherwise
cold--was to  get to Fordingbridge and be a county lady in the
home of her ancestors. But  Jimmy got her, there: he shut on her
the door of the Channel; even on the  fairest day of blue sky, with
the cliffs of England shining like mother of  pearl in full view of
Calais, I would not have let her cross the steamer  gangway to save
her life. I tell you it fixed her.

It fixed her beautifully, because she could not announce herself as
cured,  since that would have put an end to the locked bedroom
arrangements. And, by  the time she was sick of Jimmy--which
happened in the year 1903 --she had  taken on Edward
Ashburnham. Yes, it was a bad fix for her, because Edward  could
have taken her to Fordingbridge, and, though he could not give her 
Branshaw Manor, that home of her ancestors being settled on his
wife, she  could at least have pretty considerably queened it there
or thereabouts,  what with our money and the support of the
Ashburnhams. Her uncle, as soon  as he considered that she had
really settled down with me-- and I sent him  only the most
glowing accounts of her virtue and constancy --made over to  her a
very considerable part of his fortune for which he had no use. I 
suppose that we had, between us, fifteen thousand a year in
English money,  though I never quite knew how much of hers went
to Jimmy. At any rate, we  could have shone in Fordingbridge.  I
never quite knew, either, how she and Edward got rid of Jimmy. I
fancy  that fat and disreputable raven must have had his six golden
front teeth  knocked down his throat by Edward one morning
whilst I had gone out to buy  some flowers in the Rue de la Paix,
leaving Florence and the flat in charge  of those two. And serve
him very right, is all that I can say. He was a bad  sort of
blackmailer; I hope Florence does not have his company in the
next  world.

As God is my Judge, I do not believe that I would have separated
those two  if I had known that they really and passionately loved
each other. I do not  know where the public morality of the case
comes in, and, of course, no man  really knows what he would
have done in any given case. But I truly believe  that I would have
united them, observing ways and means as decent as I  could. I
believe that I should have given them money to live upon and that
I  should have consoled myself somehow. At that date I might have
found some  young thing, like Maisie Maidan, or the poor girl, and
I might have had some  peace. For peace I never had with
Florence, and hardly believe that I cared  for her in the way of love
after a year or two of it. She became for me a  rare and fragile
object, something burdensome, but very frail. Why it was as  if I
had been given a thin-shelled pullet's egg to carry on my palm
from  Equatorial Africa to Hoboken. Yes, she became for me, as it
were, the  subject of a bet--the trophy of an athlete's achievement,
a parsley crown  that is the symbol of his chastity, his soberness,
his abstentions, and of  his inflexible will. Of intrinsic value as a
wife, I think she had none at  all for me. I fancy I was not even
proud of the way she dressed.

But her passion for Jimmy was not even a passion, and, mad as the
suggestion  may appear, she was frightened for her life. Yes, she
was afraid of me. I  will tell you how that happened.  I had, in the
old days, a darky servant, called Julius, who valeted me, and 
waited on me, and loved me, like the crown of his head. Now,
when we left  Waterbury to go to the "Pocahontas", Florence
entrusted to me one very  special and very precious leather grip.
She told me that her life might  depend on that grip, which
contained her drugs against heart attacks. And,  since I was never
much of a hand at carrying things, I entrusted this, in  turn, to
Julius, who was a grey-haired chap of sixty or so, and very 
picturesque at that. He made so much impression on Florence that
she  regarded him as a sort of father, and absolutely refused to let
me take him  to Paris. He would have inconvenienced her.

Well, Julius was so overcome with grief at being left behind that
he must  needs go and drop the precious grip. I saw red, I saw
purple. I flew at  Julius. On the ferry, it was, I filled up one of his
eyes; I threatened to  strangle him. And, since an unresisting negro
can make a deplorable noise  and a deplorable spectacle, and,
since that was Florence's first adventure  in the married state, she
got a pretty idea of my character. It affirmed in  her the desperate
resolve to conceal from me the fact that she was not what  she
would have called "a pure woman". For that was really the
mainspring of  her fantastic actions. She was afraid that I should
murder her. . . .

So she got up the heart attack, at the earliest possible opportunity,
on  board the liner. Perhaps she was not so very much to be
blamed. You must  remember that she was a New Englander, and
that New England had not yet come  to loathe darkies as it does
now. Whereas, if she had come from even so  little south as
Philadelphia, and had been an oldish family, she would have  seen
that for me to kick Julius was not so outrageous an act as for her 
cousin, Reggie Hurlbird, to say--as I have heard him say to his
English  butler--that for two cents he would bat him on the pants.
Besides, the  medicine-grip did not bulk as largely in her eyes as it
did in mine, where  it was the symbol of the existence of an adored
wife of a day. To her it was  just a useful lie. . . .

Well, there you have the position, as clear as I can make it--the
husband an  ignorant fool, the wife a cold sensualist with imbecile
fears--for I was  such a fool that I should never have known what
she was or was not--and the  blackmailing lover. And then the
other lover came along. . . .

Well, Edward Ashburnham was worth having. Have I conveyed to
you the  splendid fellow that he was--the fine soldier, the excellent
landlord, the  extraordinarily kind, careful and industrious
magistrate, the upright,  honest, fair-dealing, fair-thinking, public
character? I suppose I have not  conveyed it to you. The truth is,
that I never knew it until the poor girl  came along--the poor girl
who was just as straight, as splendid and as  upright as he. I swear
she was. I suppose I ought to have known. I suppose  that was,
really, why I liked him so much--so infinitely much. Come to think 
of it, I can remember a thousand little acts of kindliness, of 
thoughtfulness for his inferiors, even on the Continent. Look here,
I know  of two families of dirty, unpicturesque, Hessian paupers
that that fellow,  with an infinite patience, rooted up, got their
police reports, set on their  feet, or exported to my patient land.
And he would do it quite  inarticulately, set in motion by seeing a
child crying in the street. He  would wrestle with dictionaries, in
that unfamiliar tongue. . . . Well, he  could not bear to see a child
cry. Perhaps he could not bear to see a woman  and not give her
the comfort of his physical attractions.  But, although I liked him
so intensely, I was rather apt to take these  things for granted. They
made me feel comfortable with him, good towards  him; they
made me trust him. But I guess I thought it was part of the 
character of any English gentleman. Why, one day he got it into his
head  that the head waiter at the Excelsior had been crying--the
fellow with the  grey face and grey whiskers. And then he spent the
best part of a week, in  correspondence and up at the British
consul's, in getting the fellow's wife  to come back from London
and bring back his girl baby. She had bolted with a  Swiss scullion.
If she had not come inside the week he would have gone to 
London himself to fetch her. He was like that.  Edward
Ashburnham was like that, and I thought it was only the duty of his 
rank and station. Perhaps that was all that it was--but I pray God to
make  me discharge mine as well. And, but for the poor girl, I
daresay that I  should never have seen it, however much the feeling
might have been over me.  She had for him such enthusiasm that,
although even now I do not understand  the technicalities of
English life, I can gather enough. She was with them  during the
whole of our last stay at Nauheim.

Nancy Rufford was her name; she was Leonora's only friend's only
child, and  Leonora was her guardian, if that is the correct term.
She had lived with  the Ashburnhams ever since she had been of
the age of thirteen, when her  mother was said to have committed
suicide owing to the brutalities of her  father. Yes, it is a cheerful
story. . . .  Edward always called her "the girl", and it was very
pretty, the evident  affection he had for her and she for him. And
Leonora's feet she would have  kissed--those two were for her the
best man and the best woman on earth--and  in heaven. I think that
she had not a thought of evil in her head--the poor  girl. . . .

Well, anyhow, she chanted Edward's praises to me for the hour
together, but,  as I have said, I could not make much of it. It
appeared that he had the  D.S.O., and that his troop loved him
beyond the love of men. You never saw  such a troop as his. And
he had the Royal Humane Society's medal with a  clasp. That
meant, apparently, that he had twice jumped off the deck of a 
troopship to rescue what the girl called "Tommies", who had fallen
overboard  in the Red Sea and such places. He had been twice
recommended for the V.C.,  whatever that might mean, and,
although owing to some technicalities he had  never received that
apparently coveted order, he had some special place  about his
sovereign at the coronation. Or perhaps it was some post in the 
Beefeaters'. She made him out like a cross between Lohengrin and
the  Chevalier Bayard. Perhaps he was. . . . But he was too silent a
fellow to  make that side of him really decorative. I remember
going to him at about  that time and asking him what the D.S.O.
was, and he grunted out:

"It's a sort of a thing they give grocers who've honourably supplied
the  troops with adulterated coffee in war-time"--something of that
sort. He did  not quite carry conviction to me, so, in the end, I put
it directly to  Leonora. I asked her fully and squarely--prefacing the
question with some  remarks, such as those that I have already
given you, as to the difficulty  one has in really getting to know
people when one's intimacy is conducted as  an English
acquaintanceship--I asked her whether her husband was not really 
a splendid fellow--along at least the lines of his public functions.
She  looked at me with a slightly awakened air--with an air that
would have been  almost startled if Leonora could ever have been
startled.

"Didn't you know?" she asked. "If I come to think of it there is not
a more  splendid fellow in any three counties, pick them where you
will--along those  lines." And she added, after she had looked at
me reflectively for what  seemed a long time:

"To do my husband justice there could not be a better man on the
earth.  There would not be room for it--along those lines."

"Well," I said, "then he must really be Lohengrin and the Cid in
one body.  For there are not any other lines that count."

Again she looked at me for a long time.

"It's your opinion that there are no other lines that count?" she
asked  slowly.

"Well," I answered gaily, "you're not going to accuse him of not
being a  good husband, or of not being a good guardian to your
ward?"

She spoke then, slowly, like a person who is listening to the sounds
in a  sea-shell held to her ear--and, would you believe it?--she told
me  afterwards that, at that speech of mine, for the first time she
had a vague  inkling of the tragedy that was to follow so
soon--although the girl had  lived with them for eight years or so:

"Oh, I'm not thinking of saying that he is not the best of husbands,
or that  he is not very fond of the girl."

And then I said something like:

"Well, Leonora, a man sees more of these things than even a wife.
And, let  me tell you, that in all the years I've known Edward he
has never, in your  absence, paid a moment's attention to any other
woman--not by the quivering  of an eyelash. I should have noticed.
And he talks of you as if you were one  of the angels of God."

"Oh," she came up to the scratch, as you could be sure Leonora
would always  come up to the scratch, "I am perfectly sure that he
always speaks nicely of  me."

I daresay she had practice in that sort of scene--people must have
been  always complimenting her on her husband's fidelity and
adoration. For half  the world--the whole of the world that knew
Edward and Leonora believed that  his conviction in the Kilsyte
affair had been a miscarriage of justice--a  conspiracy of false
evidence, got together by Nonconformist adversaries. But  think of
the fool that I was. . . .

II 

LET me think where we were. Oh, yes . . . that conversation took
place on  the 4th of August, 1913. I remember saying to her that,
on that day, exactly  nine years before, I had made their
acquaintance, so that it had seemed  quite appropriate and like a
birthday speech to utter my little testimonial  to my friend Edward.
I could quite confidently say that, though we four had  been about
together in all sorts of places, for all that length of time, I  had not,
for my part, one single complaint to make of either of them. And I 
added, that that was an unusual record for people who had been so
much  together. You are not to imagine that it was only at
Nauheim that we met.  That would not have suited Florence.

I find, on looking at my diaries, that on the 4th of September,
1904, Edward  accompanied Florence and myself to Paris, where
we put him up till the  twenty-first of that month. He made another
short visit to us in December of  that year--the first year of our
acquaintance. It must have been during this  visit that he knocked
Mr Jimmy's teeth down his throat. I daresay Florence  had asked
him to come over for that purpose. In 1905 he was in Paris three 
times--once with Leonora, who wanted some frocks. In 1906 we
spent the best  part of six weeks together at Mentone, and Edward
stayed with us in Paris on  his way back to London. That was how
it went.

 The fact was that in Florence the poor wretch had got hold of a
Tartar,  compared with whom Leonora was a sucking kid. He must
have had a hell of a  time. Leonora wanted to keep him for--what
shall I say--for the good of her  church, as it were, to show that
Catholic women do not lose their men. Let  it go at that, for the
moment. I will write more about her motives later,  perhaps. But
Florence was sticking on to the proprietor of the home of her 
ancestors. No doubt he was also a very passionate lover. But I am
convinced  that he was sick of Florence within three years of even
interrupted  companionship and the life that she led him. . . .

If ever Leonora so much as mentioned in a letter that they had had
a woman  staying with them--or, if she so much as mentioned a
woman's name in a  letter to me--off would go a desperate cable in
cipher to that poor wretch  at Branshaw, commanding him on pain
of an instant and horrible disclosure to  come over and assure her
of his fidelity. I daresay he would have faced it  out; I daresay he
would have thrown over Florence and taken the risk of  exposure.
But there he had Leonora to deal with. And Leonora assured him 
that, if the minutest fragment of the real situation ever got through
to my  senses, she would wreak upon him the most terrible
vengeance that she could  think of. And he did not have a very
easy job. Florence called for more and  more attentions from him
as the time went on. She would make him kiss her at  any moment
of the day; and it was only by his making it plain that a  divorced
lady could never assume a position in the county of Hampshire
that  he could prevent her from making a bolt of it with him in her
train. Oh,  yes, it was a difficult job for him.

For Florence, if you please, gaining in time a more composed view
of nature,  and overcome by her habits of garrulity, arrived at a
frame of mind in which  she found it almost necessary to tell me
all about it--nothing less than  that. She said that her situation was
too unbearable with regard to me.

She proposed to tell me all, secure a divorce from me, and go with
Edward  and settle in California. . . . I do not suppose that she was
really serious  in this. It would have meant the extinction of all
hopes of Branshaw Manor  for her. Besides she had got it into her
head that Leonora, who was as sound  as a roach, was
consumptive. She was always begging Leonora, before me, to  go
and see a doctor. But, none the less, poor Edward seems to have
believed  in her determination to carry him off. He would not have
gone; he cared for  his wife too much. But, if Florence had put him
at it, that would have meant  my getting to know of it, and his
incurring Leonora's vengeance. And she  could have made it pretty
hot for him in ten or a dozen different ways. And  she assured me
that she would have used every one of them. She was  determined
to spare my feelings. And she was quite aware that, at that date, 
the hottest she could have made it for him would have been to
refuse,  herself, ever to see him again. . . .

Well, I think I have made it pretty clear. Let me come to the 4th of
August,  1913, the last day of my absolute ignorance--and, I assure
you, of my  perfect happiness. For the coming of that dear girl only
added to it all.

On that 4th of August I was sitting in the lounge with a rather
odious  Englishman called Bagshawe, who had arrived that night,
too late for dinner.  Leonora had just gone to bed and I was waiting
for Florence and Edward and  the girl to come back from a concert
at the Casino. They had not gone there  all together. Florence, I
remember, had said at first that she would remain  with Leonora,
and me, and Edward and the girl had gone off alone. And then 
Leonora had said to Florence with perfect calmness:

"I wish you would go with those two. I think the girl ought to have
the  appearance of being chaperoned with Edward in these places.
I think the time  has come." So Florence, with her light step, had
slipped out after them. She  was all in black for some cousin or
other. Americans are particular in those  matters.

We had gone on sitting in the lounge till towards ten, when
Leonora had gone  up to bed. It had been a very hot day, but there
it was cool. The man called  Bagshawe had been reading The
Times on the other side of the room, but then  he moved over to
me with some trifling question as a prelude to suggesting  an
acquaintance. I fancy he asked me something About the poll-tax
on  Kur-guests, and whether it could not be sneaked out of. He was
that sort of  person.

Well, he was an unmistakable man, with a military figure, rather 
exaggerated, with bulbous eyes that avoided your own, and a pallid 
complexion that suggested vices practised in secret along with an
uneasy  desire for making acquaintance at whatever cost. . . . The
filthy toad. . .  .

He began by telling me that he came from Ludlow Manor, near
Ledbury. The  name had a slightly familiar sound, though I could
not fix it in my mind.  Then he began to talk about a duty on hops,
about Californian hops, about  Los Angeles, where he had been.
He fencing for a topic with which he might  gain my affection.

And then, quite suddenly, in the bright light of the street, I saw
Florence  running. It was like that--I saw Florence running with a
face whiter than  paper and her hand on the black stuff over her
heart. I tell you, my own  heart stood still; I tell you I could not
move. She rushed in at the swing  doors. She looked round that
place of rush chairs, cane tables and  newspapers. She saw me and
opened her lips. She saw the man who was talking  to me. She
stuck her hands over her face as if she wished to push her eyes 
out. And she was not there any more.

I could not move; I could not stir a finger. And then that man said:

"By Jove: Florry Hurlbird." He turned upon me with an oily and
uneasy sound  meant for a laugh. He was really going to ingratiate
himself with me.  "Do you know who that is?" he asked. "The last
time I saw that girl she was  coming out of the bedroom of a young
man called Jimmy at five o'clock in the  morning. In my house at
Ledbury. You saw her recognize me." He was standing  on his feet,
looking down at me. I don't know what I looked like. At any  rate,
he gave a sort of gurgle and then stuttered:

"Oh, I say. . . ." Those were the last words I ever heard of Mr
Bagshawe's.  A long time afterwards I pulled myself out of the
lounge and went up to  Florence's room. She had not locked the
door--for the first time of our  married life. She was lying, quite
respectably arranged, unlike Mrs Maidan,  on her bed. She had a
little phial that rightly should have contained  nitrate of amyl, in
her right hand. That was on the 4th of August, 1913.

 PART III

I 

THE odd thing is that what sticks out in my recollection of the rest
of that  evening was Leonora's saying:

"Of course you might marry her," and, when I asked whom, she
answered:

"The girl."

Now that is to me a very amazing thing--amazing for the light of 
possibilities that it casts into the human heart. For I had never had
the  slightest conscious idea of marrying the girl; I never had the
slightest  idea even of caring for her. I must have talked in an odd
way, as people do  who are recovering from an anaesthetic. It is as
if one had a dual  personality, the one I being entirely unconscious
of the other. I had  thought nothing; I had said such an
extraordinary thing.  I don't know that analysis of my own
psychology matters at all to this  story. I should say that it didn't or,
at any rate, that I had given enough  of it. But that odd remark of
mine had a strong influence upon what came  after. I mean, that
Leonora would probably never have spoken to me at all  about
Florence's relations with Edward if I hadn't said, two hours after
my  wife's death:

"Now I can marry the girl."

She had, then, taken it for granted that I had been suffering all that
she  had been suffering, or, at least, that I had permitted all that
she had  permitted. So that, a month ago, about a week after the
funeral of poor  Edward, she could say to me in the most natural
way in the world--I had been  talking about the duration of my stay
at Branshaw--she said with her clear,  reflective intonation:

"Oh, stop here for ever and ever if you can." And then she added,
"You  couldn't be more of a brother to me, or more of a counsellor,
or more of a  support. You are all the consolation I have in the
world. And isn't it odd  to think that if your wife hadn't been my
husband's mistress, you would  probably never have been here at
all?"

That was how I got the news--full in the face, like that. I didn't say 
anything and I don't suppose I felt anything, unless maybe it was
with that  mysterious and unconscious self that underlies most
people. Perhaps one day  when I am unconscious or walking in my
sleep I may go and spit upon poor  Edward's grave. It seems about
the most unlikely thing I could do; but there  it is.  No, I remember
no emotion of any sort, but just the clear feeling that one  has from
time to time when one hears that some Mrs So-and-So is au mieux 
with a certain gentleman. It made things plainer, suddenly, to my
curiosity.  It was as if I thought, at that moment, of a windy
November evening, that,  when I came to think it over afterwards,
a dozen unexplained things would  fit themselves into place. But I
wasn't thinking things over then. I  remember that distinctly. I was
just sitting back, rather stiffly, in a deep  arm-chair. That is what I
remember. It was twilight.

Branshaw Manor lies in a little hollow with lawns across it and
pine-woods  on the fringe of the dip. The immense wind, coming
from across the forest,  roared overhead. But the view from the
window was perfectly quiet and grey.  Not a thing stirred, except a
couple of rabbits on the extreme edge of the  lawn. It was
Leonora's own little study that we were in and we were waiting  for
the tea to be brought. I, as I said, was sitting in the deep chair, 
Leonora was standing in the window twirling the wooden acorn at
the end of  the window-blind cord desultorily round and round.
She looked across the  lawn and said, as far as I can remember:

"Edward has been dead only ten days and yet there are rabbits on
the lawn."

I understand that rabbits do a great deal of harm to the short grass
in  England. And then she turned round to me and said without any
adornment at  all, for I remember her exact words:

"I think it was stupid of Florence to commit suicide."

I cannot tell you the extraordinary sense of leisure that we two
seemed to  have at that moment. It wasn't as if we were waiting for
a train, it wasn't  as if we were waiting for a meal--it was just that
there was nothing to wait  for. Nothing.  There was an extreme
stillness with the remote and intermittent sound of the  wind.
There was the grey light in that brown, small room. And there
appeared  to be nothing else in the world. I knew then that Leonora
was about to let  me into her full confidence. It was as if--or no, it
was the actual fact  that--Leonora with an odd English sense of
decency had determined to wait  until Edward had been in his
grave for a full week before she spoke. And  with some vague
motive of giving her an idea of the extent to which she must 
permit herself to make confidences, I said slowly --and these
words too I  remember with exactitude--"Did Florence commit
suicide? I didn't know."

I was just, you understand, trying to let her know that, if she were
going  to speak she would have to talk about a much wider range
of things than she  had before thought necessary.

So that that was the first knowledge I had that Florence had
committed  suicide. It had never entered my head. You may think
that I had been  singularly lacking in suspiciousness; you may
consider me even to have been  an imbecile. But consider the
position.

In such circumstances of clamour, of outcry, of the crash of many
people  running together, of the professional reticence of such
people as  hotel-keepers, the traditional reticence of such "good
people" as the  Ashburnhams--in such circumstances it is some
little material object,  always, that catches the eye and that appeals
to the imagination. I had no  possible guide to the idea of suicide
and the sight of the little flask of  nitrate of amyl in Florence's
hand suggested instantly to my mind the idea  of the failure of her
heart. Nitrate of amyl, you understand, is the drug  that is given to
relieve sufferers from angina pectoris.

Seeing Florence, as I had seen her, running with a white face and
with one  hand held over her heart, and seeing her, as I
immediately afterwards saw  her, lying upon her bed with the so
familiar little brown flask clenched in  her fingers, it was natural
enough for my mind to frame the idea. As  happened now and
again, I thought, she had gone out without her remedy and,  having
felt an attack coming on whilst she was in the gardens, she had run 
in to get the nitrate in order, as quickly as possible, to obtain relief. 
And it was equally inevitable my mind should frame the thought
that her  heart, unable to stand the strain of the running, should
have broken in her  side. How could I have known that, during all
the years of our married life,  that little brown flask had contained,
not nitrate of amyl, but prussic  acid? It was inconceivable.

Why, not even Edward Ashburnham, who was, after all more
intimate with her  than I was, had an inkling of the truth. He just
thought that she had  dropped dead of heart disease. Indeed, I
fancy that the only people who ever  knew that Florence had
committed suicide were Leonora, the Grand Duke, the  head of the
police and the hotel-keeper. I mention these last three because  my
recollection of that night is only the sort of pinkish effulgence
from  the electric-lamps in the hotel lounge. There seemed to bob
into my  consciousness, like floating globes, the faces of those
three. Now it would  be the bearded, monarchical, benevolent head
of the Grand Duke; then the  sharp-featured, brown,
cavalry-moustached feature of the chief of police;  then the
globular, polished and high-collared vacuousness that represented 
Monsieur Schontz, the proprietor of the hotel. At times one head
would be  there alone, at another the spiked helmet of the official
would be close to  the healthy baldness of the prince; then M.
Schontz's oiled locks would push  in between the two. The
sovereign's soft, exquisitely trained voice would  say, "Ja, ja, ja!"
each word dropping out like so many soft pellets of suet;  the
subdued rasp of the official would come: "Zum Befehl
Durchlaucht," like  five revolver-shots; the voice of M. Schontz
would go on and on under its  breath like that of an unclean priest
reciting from his breviary in the  corner of a railway-carriage. That
was how it presented itself to me.

They seemed to take no notice of me; I don't suppose that I was
even  addressed by one of them. But, as long as one or the other, or
all three of  them were there, they stood between me as if, I being
the titular possessor  of the corpse, had a right to be present at their
conferences. Then they all  went away and I was left alone for a
long time.

And I thought nothing; absolutely nothing. I had no ideas; I had no 
strength. I felt no sorrow, no desire for action, no inclination to go 
upstairs and fall upon the body of my wife. I just saw the pink
effulgence,  the cane tables, the palms, the globular match-holders,
the indented  ash-trays. And then Leonora came to me and it
appears that I addressed to  her that singular remark:

"Now I can marry the girl."

But I have given you absolutely the whole of my recollection of
that  evening, as it is the whole of my recollection of the
succeeding three or  four days. I was in a state just simply
cataleptic. They put me to bed and I  stayed there; they brought me
my clothes and I dressed; they led me to an  open grave and I stood
beside it. If they had taken me to the edge of a  river, or if they had
flung me beneath a railway train, I should have been  drowned or
mangled in the same spirit. I was the walking dead.

Well, those are my impressions.

What had actually happened had been this. I pieced it together
afterwards.  You will remember I said that Edward Ashburnham
and the girl had gone off,  that night, to a concert at the Casino and
that Leonora had asked Florence,  almost immediately after their
departure, to follow them and to perform the  office of chaperone.
Florence, you may also remember, was all in black,  being the
mourning that she wore for a deceased cousin, Jean Hurlbird. It 
was a very black night and the girl was dressed in cream-coloured
muslin,  that must have glimmered under the tall trees of the dark
park like a  phosphorescent fish in a cupboard. You couldn't have
had a better beacon.

And it appears that Edward Ashburnham led the girl not up the
straight alle  that leads to the Casino, but in under the dark trees
of the park. Edward  Ashburnham told me all this in his final
outburst. I have told you that,  upon that occasion, he became
deucedly vocal. I didn't pump him. I hadn't  any motive. At that
time I didn't in the least connect him with my wife. But  the fellow
talked like a cheap novelist.--Or like a very good novelist for  the
matter of that, if it's the business of a novelist to make you see 
things clearly. And I tell you I see that thing as clearly as if it were
a  dream that never left me. It appears that, not very far from the
Casino, he  and the girl sat down in the darkness upon a public
bench. The lights from  that place of entertainment must have
reached them through the tree-trunks,  since, Edward said, he
could quite plainly see the girl's face--that beloved  face with the
high forehead, the queer mouth, the tortured eyebrows, and the 
direct eyes. And to Florence, creeping up behind them, they must
have  presented the appearance of silhouettes. For I take it that
Florence came  creeping up behind them over the short grass to a
tree that, I quite well  remember, was immediately behind that
public seat. It was not a very  difficult feat for a woman instinct
with jealousy. The Casino orchestra was,  as Edward remembered
to tell me, playing the Rakocsy march, and although it  was not
loud enough, at that distance, to drown the voice of Edward 
Ashburnham it was certainly sufficiently audible to efface,
amongst the  noises of the night, the slight brushings and rustlings
that might have been  made by the feet of Florence or by her gown
in coming over the short grass.  And that miserable woman must
have got it in the face, good and strong. It  must have been horrible
for her. Horrible! Well, I suppose she deserved all  that she got.

Anyhow, there you have the picture, the immensely tall trees, elms
most of  them, towering and feathering away up into the black
mistiness that trees  seem to gather about them at night; the
silhouettes of those two upon the  seat; the beams of light coming
from the Casino, the woman all in black  peeping with fear behind
the tree-trunk. It is melodrama; but I can't help  it.

And then, it appears, something happened to Edward Ashburnham.
He assured  me--and I see no reason for disbelieving him--that
until that moment he had  had no idea whatever of caring for the
girl. He said that he had regarded  her exactly as he would have
regarded a daughter. He certainly loved her,  but with a very deep,
very tender and very tranquil love. He had missed her  when she
went away to her convent-school; he had been glad when she had 
returned. But of more than that he had been totally unconscious.
Had he been  conscious of it, he assured me, he would have fled
from it as from a thing  accursed. He realized that it was the last
outrage upon Leonora. But the  real point was his entire
unconsciousness. He had gone with her into that  dark park with no
quickening of the pulse, with no desire for the intimacy  of
solitude. He had gone, intending to talk about polo-ponies, and 
tennis-racquets; about the temperament of the reverend Mother at
the convent  she had left and about whether her frock for a party
when they got home  should be white or blue. It hadn't come into
his head that they would talk  about a single thing that they hadn't
always talked about; it had not even  come into his head that the
tabu which extended around her was not  inviolable. And then,
suddenly, that-- He was very careful to assure me that at that time
there was no physical  motive about his declaration. It did not
appear to him to be a matter of a  dark night and a propinquity and
so on. No, it was simply of her effect on  the moral side of his life
that he appears to have talked. He said that he  never had the
slightest notion to enfold her in his arms or so much as to  touch
her hand. He swore that he did not touch her hand. He said that
they  sat, she at one end of the bench, he at the other; he leaning
slightly  towards her and she looking straight towards the light of
the Casino, her  face illuminated by the lamps. The expression
upon her face he could only  describe as "queer". At another time,
indeed, he made it appear that he  thought she was glad. It is easy
to imagine that she was glad, since at that  time she could have had
no idea of what was really happening. Frankly, she  adored Edward
Ashburnham. He was for her, in everything that she said at  that
time, the model of humanity, the hero, the athlete, the father of his 
country, the law-giver. So that for her, to be suddenly, intimately
and  overwhelmingly praised must have been a matter for mere
gladness, however  overwhelming it were. It must have been as if a
god had approved her  handiwork or a king her loyalty. She just sat
still and listened, smiling.  And it seemed to her that all the
bitterness of her childhood, the terrors  of her tempestuous father,
the bewailings of her cruel-tongued mother were  suddenly atoned
for. She had her recompense at last. Because, of course, if  you
come to figure it out, a sudden pouring forth of passion by a man
whom  you regard as a cross between a pastor and a father might,
to a woman, have  the aspect of mere praise for good conduct. It
wouldn't, I mean, appear at  all in the light of an attempt to gain
possession. The girl, at least,  regarded him as firmly anchored to
his Leonora. She had not the slightest  inkling of any infidelities.
He had always spoken to her of his wife in  terms of reverence and
deep affection. He had given her the idea that he  regarded
Leonora as absolutely impeccable and as absolutely satisfying. 
Their union had appeared to her to be one of those blessed things
that are  spoken of and contemplated with reverence by her church.

So that, when he spoke of her as being the person he cared most
for in the  world, she naturally thought that he meant to except
Leonora and she was  just glad. It was like a father saying that he
approved of a marriageable  daughter . . . And Edward, when he
realized what he was doing, curbed his  tongue at once. She was
just glad and she went on being just glad.

I suppose that that was the most monstrously wicked thing that
Edward  Ashburnham ever did in his life. And yet I am so near to
all these people  that I cannot think any of them wicked. It is
impossible of me to think of  Edward Ashburnham as anything but
straight, upright and honourable. That, I  mean, is, in spite of
everything, my permanent view of him. I try at times  by dwelling
on some of the things that he did to push that image of him  away,
as you might try to push aside a large pendulum. But it always
comes  back--the memory of his innumerable acts of kindness, of
his efficiency, of  his unspiteful tongue. He was such a fine fellow.

So I feel myself forced to attempt to excuse him in this as in so
many other  things. It is, I have no doubt, a most monstrous thing
to attempt to corrupt  a young girl just out of a convent. But I think
Edward had no idea at all of  corrupting her. I believe that he
simply loved her. He said that that was  the way of it and I, at least,
believe him and I believe too that she was  the only woman he ever
really loved. He said that that was so; and he did  enough to prove
it. And Leonora said that it was so and Leonora knew him to  the
bottom of his heart.

I have come to be very much of a cynic in these matters; I mean
that it is  impossible to believe in the permanence of man's or
woman's love. Or, at any  rate, it is impossible to believe in the
permanence of any early passion. As  I see it, at least, with regard
to man, a love affair, a love for any  definite woman--is something
in the nature of a widening of the experience.  With each new
woman that a man is attracted to there appears to come a 
broadening of the outlook, or, if you like, an acquiring of new
territory. A  turn of the eyebrow, a tone of the voice, a queer
characteristic  gesture--all these things, and it is these things that
cause to arise the  passion of love--all these things are like so many
objects on the horizon of  the landscape that tempt a man to walk
beyond the horizon, to explore. He  wants to get, as it were, behind
those eyebrows with the peculiar turn, as  if he desired to see the
world with the eyes that they overshadow. He wants  to hear that
voice applying itself to every possible proposition, to every 
possible topic; he wants to see those characteristic gestures against
every  possible background. Of the question of the sex-instinct I
know very little  and I do not think that it counts for very much in
a really great passion.  It can be aroused by such nothings--by an
untied shoelace, by a glance of  the eye in passing-- that I think it
might be left out of the calculation. I  don't mean to say that any
great passion can exist without a desire for  consummation. That
seems to me to be a commonplace and to be therefore a  matter
needing no comment at all. It is a thing, with all its accidents,  that
must be taken for granted, as, in a novel, or a biography, you take
it  for granted that the characters have their meals with some
regularity. But  the real fierceness of desire, the real heat of a
passion long continued and  withering up the soul of a man is the
craving for identity with the woman  that he loves. He desires to
see with the same eyes, to touch with the same  sense of touch, to
hear with the same ears, to lose his identity, to be  enveloped, to be
supported. For, whatever may be said of the relation of the  sexes,
there is no man who loves a woman that does not desire to come to
her  for the renewal of his courage, for the cutting asunder of his
difficulties.  And that will be the mainspring of his desire for her.
We are all so afraid,  we are all so alone, we all so need from the
outside the assurance of our  own worthiness to exist.  So, for a
time, if such a passion come to fruition, the man will get what he 
wants. He will get the moral support, the encouragement, the relief
from the  sense of loneliness, the assurance of his own worth. But
these things pass  away; inevitably they pass away as the shadows
pass across sundials. It is  sad, but it is so. The pages of the book
will become familiar; the beautiful  corner of the road will have
been turned too many times. Well, this is the  saddest story.  And
yet I do believe that for every man there comes at last a woman--or
no,  that is the wrong way of formulating it. For every man there
comes at last a  time of life when the woman who then sets her
seal upon his imagination has  set her seal for good. He will travel
over no more horizons; he will never  again set the knapsack over
his shoulders; he will retire from those scenes.  He will have gone
out of the business.  That at any rate was the case with Edward and
the poor girl. It was quite  literally the case. It was quite literally
the case that his passions--for  the mistress of the Grand Duke, for
Mrs Basil, for little Mrs Maidan, for  Florence, for whom you
will--these passions were merely preliminary canters  compared to
his final race with death for her. I am certain of that. I am  not
going to be so American as to say that all true love demands some 
sacrifice. It doesn't. But I think that love will be truer and more 
permanent in which self-sacrifice has been exacted. And, in the
case of the  other women, Edward just cut in and cut them out as
he did with the  polo-ball from under the nose of Count Baron von
Lelffel. I don't mean to  say that he didn't wear himself as thin as
a lath in the endeavour to  capture the other women; but over her
he wore himself to rags and tatters  and death--in the effort to
leave her alone.

And, in speaking to her on that night, he wasn't, I am convinced,
committing  a baseness. It was as if his passion for her hadn't
existed; as if the very  words that he spoke, without knowing that
he spoke them, created the passion  as they went along. Before he
spoke, there was nothing; afterwards, it was  the integral fact of his
life. Well, I must get back to my story.

And my story was concerning itself with Florence--with Florence,
who heard  those words from behind the tree. That of course is
only conjecture, but I  think the conjecture is pretty well justified.
You have the fact that those  two went out, that she followed them
almost immediately afterwards through  the darkness and, a little
later, she came running back to the hotel with  that pallid face and
the hand clutching her dress over her heart. It can't  have been only
Bagshawe. Her face was contorted with agony before ever her 
eyes fell upon me or upon him beside me. But I dare say Bagshawe
may have  been the determining influence in her suicide. Leonora
says that she had  that flask, apparently of nitrate of amyl, but
actually of prussic acid, for  many years and that she was
determined to use it if ever I discovered the  nature of her
relationship with that fellow Jimmy. You see, the mainspring  of
her nature must have been vanity. There is no reason why it
shouldn't  have been; I guess it is vanity that makes most of us
keep straight, if we  do keep straight, in this world.

If it had been merely a matter of Edward's relations with the girl I
dare  say Florence would have faced it out. She would no doubt
have made him  scenes, have threatened him, have appealed to his
sense of humour, to his  promises. But Mr Bagshawe and the fact
that the date was the 4th of August  must have been too much for
her superstitious mind. You see, she had two  things that she
wanted. She wanted to be a great lady, installed in Branshaw 
Teleragh. She wanted also to retain my respect.

She wanted, that is to say, to retain my respect for as long as she
lived  with me. I suppose, if she had persuaded Edward
Ashburnham to bolt with her  she would have let the whole thing
go with a run. Or perhaps she would have  tried to exact from me a
new respect for the greatness of her passion on the  lines of all for
love and the world well lost. That would be just like  Florence.

In all matrimonial associations there is, I believe, one constant
factor --a  desire to deceive the person with whom one lives as to
some weak spot in  one's character or in one's career. For it is
intolerable to live constantly  with one human being who perceives
one's small meannesses. It is really  death to do so--that is why so
many marriages turn out unhappily.

I, for instance, am a rather greedy man; I have a taste for good
cookery and  a watering tooth at the mere sound of the names of
certain comestibles. If  Florence had discovered this secret of mine
I should have found her  knowledge of it so unbearable that I never
could have supported all the  other privations of the rgime that
she extracted from me. I am bound to say  that Florence never
discovered this secret.

Certainly she never alluded to it; I dare say she never took
sufficient  interest in me.

And the secret weakness of Florence--the weakness that she could
not bear to  have me discover, was just that early escapade with the
fellow called Jimmy.  Let me, as this is in all probability the last
time I shall mention  Florence's name, dwell a little upon the
change that had taken place in her  psychology. She would not, I
mean, have minded if I had discovered that she  was the mistress
of Edward Ashburnham. She would rather have liked it.  Indeed,
the chief trouble of poor Leonora in those days was to keep
Florence  from making, before me, theatrical displays, on one line
or another, of that  very fact. She wanted, in one mood, to come
rushing to me, to cast herself  on her knees at my feet and to
declaim a carefully arranged, frightfully  emotional, outpouring as
to her passion. That was to show that she was like  one of the great
erotic women of whom history tells us. In another mood she 
would desire to come to me disdainfully and to tell me that I was 
considerably less than a man and that what had happened was what
must happen  when a real male came along. She wanted to say that
in cool, balanced and  sarcastic sentences. That was when she
wished to appear like the heroine of  a French comedy. Because of
course she was always play acting.

But what she didn't want me to know was the fact of her first
escapade with  the fellow called Jimmy. She had arrived at
figuring out the sort of  low-down Bowery tough that that fellow
was. Do you know what it is to  shudder, in later life, for some
small, stupid action--usually for some  small, quite genuine piece
of emotionalism--of your early life? Well, it was  that sort of
shuddering that came over Florence at the thought that she had 
surrendered to such a low fellow. I don't know that she need have
shuddered.  It was her footing old uncle's work; he ought never to
have taken those two  round the world together and shut himself
up in his cabin for the greater  part of the time. Anyhow, I am
convinced that the sight of Mr Bagshawe and  the thought that Mr
Bagshawe--for she knew that unpleasant and toadlike 
personality--the thought that Mr Bagshawe would almost certainly
reveal to  me that he had caught her coming out of Jimmy's
bedroom at five o'clock in  the morning on the 4th of August,
1900--that was the determining influence  in her suicide. And no
doubt the effect of the date was too much for her  superstitious
personality. She had been born on the 4th of August; she had 
started to go round the world on the 4th of August; she had
become a low  fellow's mistress on the 4th of August. On the same
day of the year she had  married me; on that 4th she had lost
Edward's love, and Bagshawe had  appeared like a sinister
omen--like a grin on the face of Fate. It was the  last straw. She ran
upstairs, arranged herself decoratively upon her  bed--she was a
sweetly pretty woman with smooth pink and white cheeks, long 
hair, the eyelashes falling like a tiny curtain on her cheeks. She
drank the  little phial of prussic acid and there she lay.--Oh,
extremely charming and  clear-cut--looking with a puzzled
expression at the electric-light bulb that  hung from the ceiling, or
perhaps through it, to the stars above. Who knows?  Anyhow, there
was an end of Florence.

You have no idea how quite extraordinarily for me that was the
end of  Florence. From that day to this I have never given her
another thought; I  have not bestowed upon her so much as a sigh.
Of course, when it has been  necessary to talk about her to
Leonora, or when for the purpose of these  writings I have tried to
figure her out, I have thought about her as I might  do about a
problem in algebra. But it has always been as a matter for study, 
not for remembrance. She just went completely out of existence,
like  yesterday's paper.

I was so deadly tired. And I dare say that my week or ten days of 
affaissement--of what was practically catalepsy--was just the
repose that my  exhausted nature claimed after twelve years of the
repression of my  instincts, after twelve years of playing the
trained poodle. For that was  all that I had been. I suppose that it
was the shock that did it--the  several shocks. But I am unwilling
to attribute my feelings at that time to  anything so concrete as a
shock. It was a feeling so tranquil. It was as if  an immensely
heavy--an unbearably heavy knapsack, supported upon my 
shoulders by straps, had fallen off and left my shoulders
themselves that  the straps had cut into, numb and without
sensation of life. I tell you, I  had no regret. What had I to regret? 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.

And, as it began, so that matter has remained. I didn't care whether
she had  come out of that bedroom or whether she hadn't. It simply
didn't interest  me. Florence didn't matter.

I suppose you will retort that I was in love with Nancy Rufford and
that my  indifference was therefore discreditable. Well, I am not
seeking to avoid  discredit. I was in love with Nancy Rufford as I
am in love with the poor  child's memory, quietly and quite
tenderly in my American sort of way. I had  never thought about it
until I heard Leonora state that I might now marry  her. But, from
that moment until her worse than death, I do not suppose that  I
much thought about anything else. I don't mean to say that I sighed
about  her or groaned; I just wanted to marry her as some people
want to go to  Carcassonne.

Do you understand the feeling--the sort of feeling that you must
get certain  matters out of the way, smooth out certain fairly
negligible complications  before you can go to a place that has,
during all your life, been a sort of  dream city? I didn't attach much
importance to my superior years. I was  forty-five, and she, poor
thing, was only just rising twenty-two. But she  was older than her
years and quieter. She seemed to have an odd quality of  sainthood,
as if she must inevitably end in a convent with a white coif 
framing her face. But she had frequently told me that she had no
vocation;  it just simply wasn't there--the desire to become a nun.
Well, I guess that  I was a sort of convent myself; it seemed fairly
proper that she should make  her vows to me.  No, I didn't see any
impediment on the score of age. I dare say no man does  and I was
pretty confident that with a little preparation, I could make a 
young girl happy. I could spoil her as few young girls have ever
been  spoiled; and I couldn't regard myself as personally repulsive.
No man can,  or if he ever comes to do so, that is the end of him.
But, as soon as I came  out of my catalepsy, I seemed to perceive
that my problem--that what I had  to do to prepare myself for
getting into contact with her, was just to get  back into contact
with life. I had been kept for twelve years in a rarefied 
atmosphere; what I then had to do was a little fighting with real
life, some  wrestling with men of business, some travelling
amongst larger cities,  something harsh, something masculine. I
didn't want to present myself to  Nancy Rufford as a sort of an old
maid. That was why, just a fortnight after  Florence's suicide, I set
off for the United States.

II 

IMMEDIATELY after Florence's death Leonora began to put the
leash upon Nancy  Rufford and Edward. She had guessed what had
happened under the trees near  the Casino. They stayed at
Nauheim some weeks after I went, and Leonora has  told me that
that was the most deadly time of her existence. It seemed like  a
long, silent duel with invisible weapons, so she said. And it was
rendered  all the more difficult by the girl's entire innocence. For
Nancy was always  trying to go off alone with Edward--as she had
been doing all her life,  whenever she was home for holidays. She
just wanted him to say nice things  to her again.

You see, the position was extremely complicated. It was as
complicated as it  well could be, along delicate lines. There was
the complication caused by  the fact that Edward and Leonora
never spoke to each other except when other  people were present.
Then, as I have said, their demeanours were quite  perfect. There
was the complication caused by the girl's entire innocence;  there
was the further complication that both Edward and Leonora really 
regarded the girl as their daughter. Or it might be more precise to
say that  they regarded her as being Leonora's daughter. And Nancy
was a queer girl;  it is very difficult to describe her to you.

She was tall and strikingly thin; she had a tortured mouth,
agonized eyes,  and a quite extraordinary sense of fun. You, might
put it that at times she  was exceedingly grotesque and at times
extraordinarily beautiful. Why, she  had the heaviest head of black
hair that I have ever come across; I used to  wonder how she could
bear the weight of it. She was just over twenty-one and  at times
she seemed as old as the hills, at times not much more than 
sixteen. At one moment she would be talking of the lives of the
saints and  at the next she would be tumbling all over the lawn
with the St Bernard  puppy. She could ride to hounds like a
Maenad and she could sit for hours  perfectly still, steeping
handkerchief after handkerchief in vinegar when  Leonora had one
of her headaches. She was, in short, a miracle of patience  who
could be almost miraculously impatient. It was, no doubt, the
convent  training that effected that. I remember that one of her
letters to me, when  she was about sixteen, ran something like:

"On Corpus Christi"--or it may have been some other saint's day, I
cannot  keep these things in my head--"our school played
Roehampton at Hockey. And,  seeing that our side was losing,
being three goals to one against us at  halftime, we retired into the
chapel and prayed for victory. We won by five  goals to three."
And I remember that she seemed to describe afterwards a  sort of
saturnalia. Apparently, when the victorious fifteen or eleven came 
into the refectory for supper, the whole school jumped upon the
tables and  cheered and broke the chairs on the floor and smashed
the crockery--for a  given time, until the Reverend Mother rang a
hand-bell. That is of course  the Catholic tradition--saturnalia that
can end in a moment, like the crack  of a whip. I don't, of course,
like the tradition, but I am bound to say  that it gave Nancy--or at
any rate Nancy had--a sense of rectitude that I  have never seen
surpassed. It was a thing like a knife that looked out of  her eyes
and that spoke with her voice, just now and then. It positively 
frightened me. I suppose that I was almost afraid to be in a world
where  there could be so fine a standard. I remember when she was
about fifteen or  sixteen on going back to the convent I once gave
her a couple of English  sovereigns as a tip. She thanked me in a
peculiarly heartfelt way, saying  that it would come in extremely
handy. I asked her why and she explained.  There was a rule at the
school that the pupils were not to speak when they  walked
through the garden from the chapel to the refectory. And, since this 
rule appeared to be idiotic and arbitrary, she broke it on purpose
day after  day. In the evening the children were all asked if they
had committed any  faults during the day, and every evening
Nancy confessed that she had broken  this particular rule. It cost
her sixpence a time, that being the fine  attached to the offence.
Just for the information I asked her why she always  confessed,
and she answered in these exact words:

"Oh, well, the girls of the Holy Child have always been noted for
their  truthfulness. It's a beastly bore, but I've got to do it."

I dare say that the miserable nature of her childhood, coming
before the  mixture of saturnalia and discipline that was her
convent life, added  something to her queernesses. Her father was
a violent madman of a fellow, a  major of one of what I believe are
called the Highland regiments. He didn't  drink, but he had an
ungovernable temper, and the first thing that Nancy  could
remember was seeing her father strike her mother with his
clenched  fist so that her mother fell over sideways from the
breakfast-table and lay  motionless. The mother was no doubt an
irritating woman and the privates of  that regiment appeared to
have been irritating, too, so that the house was a  place of outcries
and perpetual disturbances. Mrs Rufford was Leonora's  dearest
friend and Leonora could be cutting enough at times. But I fancy
she  was as nothing to Mrs Rufford. The Major would come in to
lunch harassed and  already spitting out oaths after an
unsatisfactory morning's drilling of his  stubborn men beneath a
hot sun. And then Mrs Rufford would make some cutting  remark
and pandemonium would break loose. Once, when she had been
about  twelve, Nancy had tried to intervene between the pair of
them. Her father  had struck her full upon the forehead a blow so
terrible that she had lain  unconscious for three days. Nevertheless,
Nancy seemed to prefer her father  to her mother. She remembered
rough kindnesses from him. Once or twice when  she had been
quite small he had dressed her in a clumsy, impatient, but very 
tender way. It was nearly always impossible to get a servant to stay
in the  family and, for days at a time, apparently, Mrs Rufford
would be incapable.  I fancy she drank. At any rate, she had so
cutting a tongue that even Nancy  was afraid of her--she so made
fun of any tenderness, she so sneered at all  emotional displays.
Nancy must have been a very emotional child.

Then one day, quite suddenly, on her return from a ride at Fort
William,  Nancy had been sent, with her governess, who had a
white face, right down  South to that convent school. She had been
expecting to go there in two  months' time. Her mother
disappeared from her life at that time. A fortnight  later Leonora
came to the convent and told her that her mother was dead. 
Perhaps she was. At any rate, I never heard until the very end what
became  of Mrs Rufford. Leonora never spoke of her.

And then Major Rufford went to India, from which he returned
very seldom and  only for very short visits; and Nancy lived herself
gradually into the life  at Branshaw Teleragh. I think that, from
that time onwards, she led a very  happy life, till the end. There
were dogs and horses and old servants and  the Forest. And there
were Edward and Leonora, who loved her.

I had known her all the time--I mean, that she always came to the 
Ashburnhams' at Nauheim for the last fortnight of their stay--and I
watched  her gradually growing. She was very cheerful with me.
She always even kissed  me, night and morning, until she was
about eighteen. And she would skip  about and fetch me things and
laugh at my tales of life in Philadelphia.  But, beneath her gaiety, I
fancy that there lurked some terrors. I remember  one day, when
she was just eighteen, during one of her father's rare visits  to
Europe, we were sitting in the gardens, near the iron-stained
fountain.  Leonora had one of her headaches and we were waiting
for Florence and Edward  to come from their baths. You have no
idea how beautiful Nancy looked that  morning.

We were talking about the desirability of taking tickets in
lotteries--of  the moral side of it, I mean. She was all in white, and
so tall and fragile;  and she had only just put her hair up, so that
the carriage of her neck had  that charming touch of youth and of
unfamiliarity. Over her throat there  played the reflection from a
little pool of water, left by a thunderstorm of  the night before, and
all the rest of her features were in the diffused and  luminous
shade of her white parasol. Her dark hair just showed beneath her 
broad, white hat of pierced, chip straw; her throat was very long
and leaned  forward, and her eyebrows, arching a little as she
laughed at some  old-fashionedness in my phraseology, had
abandoned their tense line. And  there was a little colour in her
cheeks and light in her deep blue eyes. And  to think that that vivid
white thing, that saintly and swanlike being--to  think that. . . Why,
she was like the sail of a ship, so white and so  definite in her
movements. And to think that she will never . . . Why, she  will
never do anything again. I can't believe it . . .

Anyhow, we were chattering away about the morality of lotteries.
And then,  suddenly, there came from the arcades behind us the
overtones of her  father's unmistakable voice; it was as if a
modified foghorn had boomed with  a reed inside it. I looked
round to catch sight of him. A tall, fair,  stiffly upright man of
fifty, he was walking away with an Italian baron who  had had
much to do with the Belgian Congo. They must have been talking
about  the proper treatment of natives, for I heard him say:

"Oh, hang humanity!"

When I looked again at Nancy her eyes were closed and her face
was more  pallid than her dress, which had at least some pinkish
reflections from the  gravel. It was dreadful to see her with her
eyes closed like that.

"Oh!" she exclaimed, and her hand that had appeared to be
groping, settled  for a moment on my arm. "Never speak of it.
Promise never to tell my father  of it. It brings back those dreadful
dreams . . ." And, when she opened her  eyes she looked straight
into mine. "The blessed saints," she said, "you  would think they
would spare you such things. I don't believe all the  sinning in the
world could make one deserve them."

They say the poor thing was always allowed a light at night, even
in her  bedroom. . . . And yet, no young girl could more archly and
lovingly have  played with an adored father. She was always
holding him by both coat  lapels; cross-questioning him as to how
he spent his time; kissing the top  of his head. Ah, she was
well-bred, if ever anyone was.

The poor, wretched man cringed before her--but she could not
have done more  to put him at his ease. Perhaps she had had
lessons in it at her convent. It  was only that peculiar note of his
voice, used when he was overbearing or  dogmatic, that could
unman her--and that was only visible when it came  unexpectedly.
That was because the bad dreams that the blessed saints  allowed
her to have for her sins always seemed to her to herald themselves 
by the booming sound of her father's voice. It was that sound that
had  always preceded his entrance for the terrible lunches of her
childhood. . .  .

I have reported, earlier in this chapter, that Leonora said, during
that  remainder of their stay at Nauheim, after I had left, it had
seemed to her  that she was fighting a long duel with unseen
weapons against silent  adversaries. Nancy, as I have also said, was
always trying to go off with  Edward alone. That had been her
habit for years. And Leonora found it to be  her duty to stop that. It
was very difficult. Nancy was used to having her  own way, and for
years she had been used to going off with Edward, ratting, 
rabbiting, catching salmon down at Fordingbridge, district-visiting
of the  sort that Edward indulged in, or calling on the tenants. And
at Nauheim she  and Edward had always gone up to the Casino
alone in the evenings--at any  rate, whenever Florence did not call
for his attendance. It shows the  obviously innocent nature of the
regard of those two that even Florence had  never had any idea of
jealousy. Leonora had cultivated the habit of going to  bed at ten
o'clock.

I don't know how she managed it, but, for all the time they were at
Nauheim,  she contrived never to let those two be alone together,
except in broad  daylight, in very crowded places. If a Protestant
had done that it would no  doubt have awakened a
self-consciousness in the girl. But Catholics, who  have always
reservations and queer spots of secrecy, can manage these things 
better. And I dare say that two things made this easier--the death of 
Florence and the fact that Edward was obviously sickening. He
appeared,  indeed, to be very ill; his shoulders began to be bowed;
there were pockets  under his eyes; he had extraordinary moments
of inattention.

And Leonora describes herself as watching him as a fierce cat
watches an  unconscious pigeon in a roadway. In that silent
watching, again, I think she  was a Catholic--of a people that can
think thoughts alien to ours and keep  them to themselves. And the
thoughts passed through her mind; some of them  even got through
to Edward with never a word spoken. At first she thought  that it
might be remorse, or grief, for the death of Florence that was 
oppressing him. But she watched and watched, and uttered
apparently random  sentences about Florence before the girl, and
she perceived that he had no  grief and no remorse. He had not any
idea that Florence could have committed  suicide without writing
at least a tirade to him. The absence of that made  him certain that
it had been heart disease. For Florence had never  undeceived him
on that point. She thought it made her seem more romantic.

No, Edward had no remorse. He was able to say to himself that he
had treated  Florence with gallant attentiveness of the kind that she
desired until two  hours before her death. Leonora gathered that
from the look in his eyes, and  from the way he straightened his
shoulders over her as she lay in her  coffin--from that and a
thousand other little things. She would speak  suddenly about
Florence to the girl and he would not start in the least; he  would
not even pay attention, but would sit with bloodshot eyes gazing at 
the tablecloth. He drank a good deal, at that time--a steady soaking
of  drink every evening till long after they had gone to bed.

For Leonora made the girl go to bed at ten, unreasonable though
that seemed  to Nancy. She would understand that, whilst they
were in a sort of half  mourning for Florence, she ought not to be
seen at public places, like the  Casino; but she could not see why
she should not accompany her uncle upon  his evening strolls
though the park. I don't know what Leonora put up as an 
excuse--something, I fancy, in the nature of a nightly orison that
she made  the girl and herself perform for the soul of Florence.
And then, one  evening, about a fortnight later, when the girl,
growing restive at even  devotional exercises, clamoured once
more to be allowed to go for a walk  with Edward, and when
Leonora was really at her wits' end, Edward gave  himself into her
hands. He was just standing up from dinner and had his face 
averted.

But he turned his heavy head and his bloodshot eyes upon his wife
and looked  full at her.

"Doctor von Hauptmann," he said, "has ordered me to go to bed
immediately  after dinner. My heart's much worse."

He continued to look at Leonora for a long minute--with a sort of
heavy  contempt. And Leonora understood that, with his speech, he
was giving her  the excuse that she needed for separating him from
the girl, and with his  eyes he was reproaching her for thinking that
he would try to corrupt Nancy.

He went silently up to his room and sat there for a long time--until
the  girl was well in bed--reading in the Anglican prayer-book.
And about  half-past ten she heard his footsteps pass her door,
going outwards. Two and  a half hours later they came back,
stumbling heavily.

She remained, reflecting upon this position until the last night of
their  stay at Nauheim. Then she suddenly acted. For, just in the
same way,  suddenly after dinner, she looked at him and said:

"Teddy, don't you think you could take a night off from your
doctor's orders  and go with Nancy to the Casino. The poor child
has had her visit so  spoiled."

He looked at her in turn for a long, balancing minute.

"Why, yes," he said at last.

Nancy jumped out of her chair and kissed him.  Those two words,
Leonora said, gave her the greatest relief of any two  syllables she
had ever heard in her life. For she realized that Edward was 
breaking up, not under the desire for possession, but from the
dogged  determination to hold his hand. She could relax some of
her vigilance.

Nevertheless, she sat in the darkness behind her half-closed
jalousies,  looking over the street and the night and the trees until,
very late, she  could hear Nancy's clear voice coming closer and
saying:

"You did look an old guy with that false nose."  There had been
some sort of celebration of a local holiday up in the  Kursaal. And
Edward replied with his sort of sulky good nature:

"As for you, you looked like old Mother Sideacher."

The girl came swinging along, a silhouette beneath a gas-lamp;
Edward,  another, slouched at her side. They were talking just as
they had talked any  time since the girl had been seventeen; with
the same tones, the same joke  about an old beggar woman who
always amused them at Branshaw. The girl, a  little later, opened
Leonora's door whilst she was still kissing Edward on  the forehead
as she had done every night.

"We've had a most glorious time," she said. "He's ever so much
better. He  raced me for twenty yards home. Why are you all in the
dark?"

Leonora could hear Edward going about in his room, but, owing to
the girl's  chatter, she could not tell whether he went out again or
not. And then, very  much later, because she thought that if he
were drinking again something  must be done to stop it, she
opened for the first time, and very softly, the  never-opened door
between their rooms. She wanted to see if he had gone out  again.
Edward was kneeling beside his bed with his head hidden in the 
counterpane. His arms, outstretched, held out before him a little
image of  the Blessed Virgin--a tawdry, scarlet and Prussian blue
affair that the girl  had given him on her first return from the
convent. His shoulders heaved  convulsively three times, and
heavy sobs came from him before she could  close the door. He
was not a Catholic; but that was the way it took him.

Leonora slept for the first time that night with a sleep from which
she  never once started.

III 

AND then Leonora completely broke down--on the day that they
returned to  Branshaw Teleragh. It is the infliction of our
miserable minds--it is the  scourge of atrocious but probably just
destiny that no grief comes by  itself. No, any great grief, though
the grief itself may have gone, leaves  in its place a train of
horrors, of misery, and despair. For Leonora was, in  herself,
relieved. She felt that she could trust Edward with the girl and  she
knew that Nancy could be absolutely trusted. And then, with the 
slackening of her vigilance, came the slackening of her entire
mind. This is  perhaps the most miserable part of the entire story.
For it is miserable to  see a clean intelligence waver; and Leonora
wavered.

You are to understand that Leonora loved Edward with a passion
that was yet  like an agony of hatred. And she had lived with him
for years and years  without addressing to him one word of
tenderness. I don't know how she could  do it. At the beginning of
that relationship she had been just married off  to him. She had
been one of seven daughters in a bare, untidy Irish  manor-house to
which she had returned from the convent I have so often  spoken
of. She had left it just a year and she was just nineteen. It is 
impossible to imagine such inexperience as was hers. You might
almost say  that she had never spoken to a man except a priest.
Coming straight from the  convent, she had gone in behind the
high walls of the manor-house that was  almost more cloistral than
any convent could have been. There were the seven  girls, there
was the strained mother, there was the worried father at whom, 
three times in the course of that year, the tenants took pot-shots
from  behind a hedge. The women-folk, upon the whole, the
tenants respected. Once  a week each of the girls, since there were
seven of them, took a drive with  the mother in the old basketwork
chaise drawn by a very fat, very lumbering  pony. They paid
occasionally a call, but even these were so rare that,  Leonora has
assured me, only three times in the year that succeeded her 
coming home from the convent did she enter another person's
house. For the  rest of the time the seven sisters ran about in the
neglected gardens  between the unpruned espaliers. Or they played
lawn-tennis or fives in an  angle of a great wall that surrounded the
garden--an angle from which the  fruit trees had long died away.
They painted in water-colour; they  embroidered; they copied
verses into albums. Once a week they went to Mass;  once a week
to the confessional, accompanied by an old nurse. They were 
happy since they had known no other life.

It appeared to them a singular extravagance when, one day, a
photographer  was brought over from the county town and
photographed them standing, all  seven, in the shadow of an old
apple tree with the grey lichen on the  raddled trunk.  But it wasn't
an extravagance.

Three weeks before Colonel Powys had written to Colonel
Ashburnham:

"I say, Harry, couldn't your Edward marry one of my girls? It
would be a  god-send to me, for I'm at the end of my tether and,
once one girl begins to  go off, the rest of them will follow."  He
went on to say that all his daughters were tall, upstanding,
clean-limbed  and absolutely pure, and he reminded Colonel
Ashburnham that, they having  been married on the same day,
though in different churches, since the one  was a Catholic and the
other an Anglican--they had said to each other, the  night before,
that, when the time came, one of their sons should marry one  of
their daughters. Mrs Ashburnham had been a Powys and remained
Mrs Powys'  dearest friend. They had drifted about the world as
English soldiers do,  seldom meeting, but their women always in
correspondence one with another.  They wrote about minute things
such as the teething of Edward and of the  earlier daughters or the
best way to repair a Jacob's ladder in a stocking.  And, if they met
seldom, yet it was often enough to keep each other's  personalities
fresh in their minds, gradually growing a little stiff in the  joints,
but always with enough to talk about and with a store of 
reminiscences. Then, as his girls began to come of age when they
must leave  the convent in which they were regularly interned
during his years of active  service, Colonel Powys retired from the
army with the necessity of making a  home for them. It happened
that the Ashburnhams had never seen any of the  Powys girls,
though, whenever the four parents met in London, Edward 
Ashburnham was always of the party. He was at that time
twenty-two and, I  believe, almost as pure in mind as Leonora
herself. It is odd how a boy can  have his virgin intelligence
untouched in this world.

That was partly due to the careful handling of his mother, partly to
the  fact that the house to which he went at Winchester had a
particularly pure  tone and partly to Edward's own peculiar
aversion from anything like coarse  language or gross stories. At
Sandhurst he had just kept out of the way of  that sort of thing. He
was keen on soldiering, keen on mathematics, on  land-surveying,
on politics and, by a queer warp of his mind, on literature.  Even
when he was twenty-two he would pass hours reading one of
Scott's  novels or the Chronicles of Froissart.  Mrs Ashburnham
considered that she was to be congratulated, and almost every 
week she wrote to Mrs Powys, dilating upon her satisfaction.

Then, one day, taking a walk down Bond Street with her son, after
having  been at Lord's, she noticed Edward suddenly turn his head
round to take a  second look at a well-dressed girl who had passed
them. She wrote about  that, too, to Mrs Powys, and expressed
some alarm. It had been, on Edward's  part, the merest reflex
action. He was so very abstracted at that time owing  to the
pressure his crammer was putting upon him that he certainly hadn't 
known what he was doing.

It was this letter of Mrs Ashburnham's to Mrs Powys that had
caused the  letter from Colonel Powys to Colonel Ashburnham--a
letter that was  half-humorous, half longing. Mrs Ashburnham
caused her husband to reply,  with a letter a little more
jocular--something to the effect that Colonel  Powys ought to give
them some idea of the goods that he was marketing. That  was the
cause of the photograph. I have seen it, the seven girls, all in  white
dresses, all very much alike in feature--all, except Leonora, a little 
heavy about the chins and a little stupid about the eyes. I dare say
it  would have made Leonora, too, look a little heavy and a little
stupid, for  it was not a good photograph. But the black shadow
from one of the branches  of the apple tree cut right across her
face, which is all but invisible.  There followed an extremely
harassing time for Colonel and Mrs Powys. Mrs  Ashburnham had
written to say that, quite sincerely, nothing would give  greater
ease to her maternal anxieties than to have her son marry one of
Mrs  Powys' daughters if only he showed some inclination to do so.
For, she  added, nothing but a love-match was to be thought of in
her Edward's case.  But the poor Powys couple had to run things so
very fine that even the  bringing together of the young people was
a desperate hazard.

The mere expenditure upon sending one of the girls over from
Ireland to  Branshaw was terrifying to them; and whichever girl
they selected might not  be the one to ring Edward's bell. On the
other hand, the expenditure upon  mere food and extra sheets for a
visit from the Ashburnhams to them was  terrifying, too. It would
mean, mathematically, going short in so many meals  themselves,
afterwards. Nevertheless, they chanced it, and all the three 
Ashburnhams came on a visit to the lonely manor-house. They
could give  Edward some rough shooting, some rough fishing and
a whirl of femininity;  but I should say the girls made really more
impression upon Mrs Ashburnham  than upon Edward himself.
They appeared to her to be so clean run and so  safe. They were
indeed so clean run that, in a faint sort of way, Edward  seems to
have regarded them rather as boys than as girls. And then, one 
evening, Mrs Ashburnham had with her boy one of those
conversations that  English mothers have with English sons. It
seems to have been a criminal  sort of proceeding, though I don't
know what took place at it. Anyhow, next  morning Colonel
Ashburnham asked on behalf of his son for the hand of  Leonora.
This caused some consternation to the Powys couple, since
Leonora  was the third daughter and Edward ought to have married
the eldest. Mrs  Powys, with her rigid sense of the proprieties,
almost wished to reject the  proposal. But the Colonel, her
husband, pointed out that the visit would  have cost them sixty
pounds, what with the hire of an extra servant, of a  horse and car,
and with the purchase of beds and bedding and extra  tablecloths.
There was nothing else for it but the marriage. In that way  Edward
and Leonora became man and wife.

I don't know that a very minute study of their progress towards
complete  disunion is necessary. Perhaps it is. But there are many
things that I  cannot well make out, about which I cannot well
question Leonora, or about  which Edward did not tell me. I do not
know that there was ever any question  of love from Edward to
her. He regarded her, certainly, as desirable amongst  her sisters.
He was obstinate to the extent of saying that if he could not  have
her he would not have any of them. And, no doubt, before the
marriage,  he made her pretty speeches out of books that he had
read. But, as far as he  could describe his feelings at all, later, it
seems that, calmly and without  any quickening of the pulse, he
just carried the girl off, there being no  opposition . It had,
however, been all so long ago that it seemed to him, at  the end of
his poor life, a dim and misty affair. He had the greatest 
admiration for Leonora.

He had the very greatest admiration. He admired her for her
truthfulness,  for her cleanness of mind, and the clean-run-ness of
her limbs, for her  efficiency, for the fairness of her skin, for the
gold of her hair, for her  religion, for her sense of duty. It was a
satisfaction to take her about  with him.

But she had not for him a touch of magnetism. I suppose, really, he
did not  love her because she was never mournful; what really
made him feel good in  life was to comfort somebody who would
be darkly and mysteriously mournful.  That he had never had to do
for Leonora. Perhaps, also, she was at first too  obedient. I do not
mean to say that she was submissive-- that she deferred,  in her j
udgements, to his. She did not. But she had been handed over to 
him, like some patient medieval virgin; she had been taught all her
life  that the first duty of a woman is to obey. And there she was.

In her, at least, admiration for his qualities very soon became love
of the  deepest description. If his pulses never quickened she, so I
have been told,  became what is called an altered being when he
approached her from the other  side of a dancing-floor. Her eyes
followed him about full of trustfulness,  of admiration, of
gratitude, and of love. He was also, in a great sense, her  pastor and
guide--and he guided her into what, for a girl straight out of a 
convent, was almost heaven. I have not the least idea of what an
English  officer's wife's existence may be like. At any rate, there
were feasts, and  chatterings, and nice men who gave her the right
sort of admiration, and  nice women who treated her as if she had
been a baby. And her confessor  approved of her life, and Edward
let her give little treats to the girls of  the convent she had left, and
the Reverend Mother approved of him. There  could not have been
a happier girl for five or six years.  For it was only at the end of
that time that clouds began, as the saying is,  to arise. She was then
about twenty-three, and her purposeful efficiency  made her
perhaps have a desire for mastery. She began to perceive that 
Edward was extravagant in his largesses. His parents died just
about that  time, and Edward, though they both decided that he
should continue his  soldiering, gave a great deal of attention to the
management of Branshaw  through a steward. Aldershot was not
very far away, and they spent all his  leaves there.

And, suddenly, she seemed to begin to perceive that his
generosities were  almost fantastic. He subscribed much too much
to things connected with his  mess, he pensioned off his father's
servants, old or new, much too  generously. They had a large
income, but every now and then they would find  themselves hard
up. He began to talk of mortgaging a farm or two, though it  never
actually came to that.

She made tentative efforts at remonstrating with him. Her father,
whom she  saw now and then, said that Edward was much too
generous to his tenants; the  wives of his brother officers
remonstrated with her in private; his large  subscriptions made it
difficult for their husbands to keep up with them.  Ironically
enough, the first real trouble between them came from his desire 
to build a Roman Catholic chapel at Branshaw. He wanted to do it
to honour  Leonora, and he proposed to do it very expensively.
Leonora did not want it;  she could perfectly well drive from
Branshaw to the nearest Catholic Church  as often as she liked.
There were no Roman Catholic tenants and no Roman  Catholic
servants except her old nurse who could always drive with her. She 
had as many priests to stay with her as could be needed--and even
the  priests did not want a gorgeous chapel in that place where it
would have  merely seemed an invidious instance of ostentation.
They were perfectly  ready to celebrate Mass for Leonora and her
nurse, when they stayed at  Branshaw, in a cleaned-up outhouse.
But Edward was as obstinate as a hog  about it.  He was truly
grieved at his wife's want of sentiment--at her refusal to  receive
that amount of public homage from him. She appeared to him to
be  wanting in imagination--to be cold and hard. I don't exactly
know what part  her priests played in the tragedy that it all
became; I dare say they  behaved quite creditably but mistakenly.
But then, who would not have been  mistaken with Edward? I
believe he was even hurt that Leonora's confessor  did not make
strenuous efforts to convert him. There was a period when he  was
quite ready to become an emotional Catholic.

I don't know why they did not take him on the hop; but they have
queer sorts  of wisdoms, those people, and queer sorts of tact.
Perhaps they thought that  Edward's too early conversion would
frighten off other Protestant desirables  from marrying Catholic
girls. Perhaps they saw deeper into Edward than he  saw himself
and thought that he would make a not very creditable convert. At 
any rate they--and Leonora--left him very much alone. It mortified
him very  considerably. He has told me that if Leonora had then
taken his aspirations  seriously everything would have been
different. But I dare say that was  nonsense.  At any rate, it was
over the question of the chapel that they had their  first and really
disastrous quarrel. Edward at that time was not well; he  supposed
himself to be overworked with his regimental affairs--he was 
managing the mess at the time. And Leonora was not well--she
was beginning  to fear that their union might be sterile. And then
her father came over  from Glasmoyle to stay with them.

Those were troublesome times in Ireland, I understand. At any
rate, Colonel  Powys had tenants on the brain--his own tenants
having shot at him with  shot-guns. And, in conversation with
Edward's land-steward, he got it into  his head that Edward
managed his estates with a mad generosity towards his  tenants. I
understand, also, that those years--the 'nineties--were very bad  for
farming. Wheat was fetching only a few shillings the hundred; the
price  of meat was so low that cattle hardly paid for raising; whole
English  counties were ruined. And Edward allowed his tenants
very high rebates.

To do both justice Leonora has since acknowledged that she was in
the wrong  at that time and that Edward was following out a more
far-seeing policy in  nursing his really very good tenants over a bad
period. It was not as if the  whole of his money came from the
land; a good deal of it was in rails. But  old Colonel Powys had
that bee in his bonnet and, if he never directly  approached Edward
himself on the subject, he preached unceasingly, whenever  he had
the opportunity, to Leonora. His pet idea was that Edward ought to 
sack all his own tenants and import a set of farmers from Scotland.
That was  what they were doing in Essex. He was of opinion that
Edward was riding  hotfoot to ruin.

That worried Leonora very much--it worried her dreadfully; she
lay awake  nights; she had an anxious line round her mouth. And
that, again, worried  Edward. I do not mean to say that Leonora
actually spoke to Edward about his  tenants--but he got to know
that some one, probably her father, had been  talking to her about
the matter. He got to know it because it was the habit  of his
steward to look in on them every morning about breakfast-time to 
report any little happenings. And there was a farmer called
Mumford who had  only paid half his rent for the last three years.
One morning the  land-steward reported that Mumford would be
unable to pay his rent at all  that year. Edward reflected for a
moment and then he said something like:

"Oh well, he's an old fellow and his family have been our tenants
for over  two hundred years. Let him off altogether."

And then Leonora--you must remember that she had reason for
being very  nervous and unhappy at that time--let out a sound that
was very like a  groan. It startled Edward, who more than
suspected what was passing in her  mind--it startled him into a
state of anger. He said sharply:

"You wouldn't have me turn out people who've been earning
money for us for  centuries--people to whom we have
responsibilities--and let in a pack of  Scotch farmers?"

He looked at her, Leonora said, with what was practically a glance
of hatred  and then, precipitately, he left the breakfast-table.
Leonora knew that it  probably made it all the worse that he had
been betrayed into a  manifestation of anger before a third party. It
was the first and last time  that he ever was betrayed into such a
manifestation of anger. The  land-steward, a moderate and
well-balanced man whose family also had been  with the
Ashburnhams for over a century, took it upon himself to explain 
that he considered Edward was pursuing a perfectly proper course
with his  tenants. He erred perhaps a little on the side of
generosity, but hard times  were hard times, and every one had to
feel the pinch, landlord as well as  tenants. The great thing was not
to let the land get into a poor state of  cultivation. Scotch farmers
just skinned your fields and let them go down  and down. But
Edward had a very good set of tenants who did their best for  him
and for themselves. These arguments at that time carried very little 
conviction to Leonora. She was, nevertheless, much concerned by
Edward's  outburst of anger.  The fact is that Leonora had been
practising economies in her department.  Two of the
under-housemaids had gone and she had not replaced them; she
had  spent much less that year upon dress. The fare she had
provided at the  dinners they gave had been much less bountiful
and not nearly so costly as  had been the case in preceding years,
and Edward began to perceive a  hardness and determination in his
wife's character. He seemed to see a net  closing round him--a net
in which they would be forced to live like one of  the
comparatively poor county families of the neighbourhood. And, in
the  mysterious way in which two people, living together, get to
know each  other's thoughts without a word spoken, he had known,
even before his  outbreak, that Leonora was worrying about his
managing of the estates. This  appeared to him to be intolerable.
He had, too, a great feeling of  self-contempt because he had been
betrayed into speaking harshly to Leonora  before that
land-steward. She imagined that his nerve must be deserting him, 
and there can have been few men more miserable than Edward
was at that  period.  You see, he was really a very simple
soul--very simple. He imagined that no  man can satisfactorily
accomplish his life's work without loyal and  whole-hearted
cooperation of the woman he lives with. And he was beginning  to
perceive dimly that, whereas his own traditions were entirely
collective,  his wife was a sheer individualist. His own theory--the
feudal theory of an  over-lord doing his best by his dependents, the
dependents meanwhile doing  their best for the over-lord--this
theory was entirely foreign to Leonora's  nature. She came of a
family of small Irish landlords--that hostile garrison  in a
plundered country. And she was thinking unceasingly of the
children she  wished to have.  I don't know why they never had any
children--not that I really believe that  children would have made
any difference. The dissimilarity of Edward and  Leonora was too
profound. It will give you some idea of the extraordinary  navet
of Edward Ashburnham that, at the time of his marriage and for 
perhaps a couple of years after, he did not really know how
children are  produced. Neither did Leonora. I don't mean to say
that this state of things  continued, but there it was. I dare say it
had a good deal of influence on  their mentalities. At any rate, they
never had a child. It was the Will of  God.

It certainly presented itself to Leonora as being the Will of God--as
being  a mysterious and awful chastisement of the Almighty. For
she had discovered  shortly before this period that her parents had
not exacted from Edward's  family the promise that any children
she should bear should be brought up as  Catholics. She herself
had never talked of the matter with either her  father, her mother,
or her husband. When at last her father had let drop  some words
leading her to believe that that was the fact, she tried  desperately
to extort the promise from Edward. She encountered an
unexpected  obstinacy. Edward was perfectly willing that the girls
should be Catholic;  the boys must be Anglican. I don't understand
the bearing of these things in  English society. Indeed, Englishmen
seem to me to be a little mad in matters  of politics or of religion.
In Edward it was particularly queer because he  himself was
perfectly ready to become a Romanist. He seemed, however, to 
contemplate going over to Rome himself and yet letting his boys
be educated  in the religion of their immediate ancestors. This may
appear illogical, but  I dare say it is not so illogical as it looks.
Edward, that is to say,  regarded himself as having his own body
and soul at his own disposal. But  his loyalty to the traditions of his
family would not permit him to bind any  future inheritors of his
name or beneficiaries by the death of his  ancestors. About the
girls it did not so much matter. They would know other  homes
and other circumstances. Besides, it was the usual thing. But the
boys  must be given the opportunity of choosing--and they must
have first of all  the Anglican teaching. He was perfectly
unshakable about this.

Leonora was in an agony during all this time. You will have to
remember she  seriously believed that children who might be born
to her went in danger, if  not absolutely of damnation, at any rate
of receiving false doctrine. It was  an agony more terrible than she
could describe. She didn't indeed attempt to  describe it, but I
could tell from her voice when she said, almost  negligently, "I
used to lie awake whole nights. It was no good my spiritual 
advisers trying to console me." I knew from her voice how terrible
and how  long those nights must have seemed and of how little
avail were the  consolations of her spiritual advisers. Her spiritual
advisers seemed to  have taken the matter a little more calmly.
They certainly told her that she  must not consider herself in any
way to have sinned. Nay, they seem even to  have extorted, to have
threatened her, with a view to getting her out of  what they
considered to be a morbid frame of mind. She would just have to 
make the best of things, to influence the children when they came,
not by  propaganda, but by personality. And they warned her that
she would be  committing a sin if she continued to think that she
had sinned.  Nevertheless, she continued to think that she had
sinned.

Leonora could not be aware that the man whom she loved
passionately and  whom, nevertheless, she was beginning to try to
rule with a rod of  iron--that this man was becoming more and
more estranged from her. He seemed  to regard her as being not
only physically and mentally cold, but even as  being actually
wicked and mean. There were times when he would almost 
shudder if she spoke to him. And she could not understand how he
could  consider her wicked or mean. It only seemed to her a sort of
madness in him  that he should try to take upon his own shoulders
the burden of his troop,  of his regiment, of his estate and of half of
his country. She could not see  that in trying to curb what she
regarded as megalomania she was doing  anything wicked. She
was just trying to keep things together for the sake of  the children
who did not come. And, little by little, the whole of their 
intercourse became simply one of agonized discussion as to
whether Edward  should subscribe to this or that institution or
should try to reclaim this  or that drunkard. She simply could not
see it.

Into this really terrible position of strain, from which there
appeared to  be no issue, the Kilsyte case came almost as a relief.
It is part of the  peculiar irony of things that Edward would
certainly never have kissed that  nurse-maid if he had not been
trying to please Leonora. Nurse-maids do not  travel first-class,
and, that day, Edward travelled in a third-class  carriage in order to
prove to Leonora that he was capable of economies. I  have said
that the Kilsyte case came almost as a relief to the strained 
situation that then existed between them. It gave Leonora an
opportunity of  backing him up in a whole-hearted and absolutely
loyal manner. It gave her  the opportunity of behaving to him as he
considered a wife should behave to  her husband.

You see, Edward found himself in a railway carriage with a quite
pretty girl  of about nineteen. And the quite pretty girl of about
nineteen, with dark  hair and red cheeks and blue eyes, was quietly
weeping. Edward had been  sitting in his corner thinking about
nothing at all. He had chanced to look  at the nurse-maid; two
large, pretty tears came out of her eyes and dropped  into her lap.
He immediately felt that he had got to do something to comfort 
her. That was his job in life. He was desperately unhappy himself
and it  seemed to him the most natural thing in the world that they
should pool  their sorrows. He was quite democratic; the idea of
the difference in their  station never seems to have occurred to
him. He began to talk to her. He  discovered that her young man
had been seen walking out with Annie of Number  54. He moved
over to her side of the carriage. He told her that the report 
probably wasn't true; that, after all, a young man might take a walk
with  Annie from Number 54 without its denoting anything very
serious. And he  assured me that he felt at least quite half-fatherly
when he put his arm  around her waist and kissed her. The girl,
however, had not forgotten the  difference of her station.

All her life, by her mother, by other girls, by schoolteachers, by the
whole  tradition of her class she had been warned against
gentlemen. She was being  kissed by a gentleman. She screamed,
tore herself away; sprang up and pulled  a communication cord.

Edward came fairly well out of the affair in the public estimation;
but it  did him, mentally, a good deal of harm.

IV

IT is very difficult to give an all-round impression of an man. I
wonder how  far I have succeeded with Edward Ashburnham. I
dare say I haven't succeeded  at all. It is ever very difficult to see
how such things matter. Was it the  important point about poor
Edward that he was very well built, carried  himself well, was
moderate at the table and led a regular life--that he had,  in fact, all
the virtues that are usually accounted English? Or have I in  the
least succeeded in conveying that he was all those things and had
all  those virtues? He certainly was them and had them up to the
last months of  his life. They were the things that one would set
upon his tombstone. They  will, indeed, be set upon his tombstone
by his widow.

And have I, I wonder, given the due impression of how his life was
portioned  and his time laid out? Because, until the very last, the
amount of time  taken up by his various passions was relatively
small. I have been forced to  write very much about his passions,
but you have to consider--I should like  to be able to make you
consider--that he rose every morning at seven, took a  cold bath,
breakfasted at eight, was occupied with his regiment from nine 
until one; played polo or cricket with the men when it was the
season for  cricket, till tea-time. Afterwards he would occupy
himself with the letters  from his land-steward or with the affairs
of his mess, till dinner-time. He  would dine and pass the evening
playing cards, or playing billiards with  Leonora or at social
functions of one kind or another. And the greater part  of his life
was taken up by that--by far the greater part of his life. His 
love-affairs, until the very end, were sandwiched in at odd
moments or took  place during the social evenings, the dances and
dinners. But I guess I have  made it hard for you, O silent listener,
to get that impression. Anyhow, I  hope I have not given you the
idea that Edward Ashburnham was a pathological  case. He wasn't.
He was just a normal man and very much of a sentimentalist.  I
dare say the quality of his youth, the nature of his mother's
influence,  his ignorances, the crammings that he received at the
hands of army  coaches--I dare say that all these excellent
influences upon his adolescence  were very bad for him. But we all
have to put up with that sort of thing and  no doubt it is very bad
for all of us. Nevertheless, the outline of Edward's  life was an
outline perfectly normal of the life of a hard-working,  sentimental
and efficient professional man.

That question of first impressions has always bothered me a good
deal-- but  quite academically. I mean that, from time to time I
have wondered whether  it were or were not best to trust to one's
first impressions in dealing with  people. But I never had anybody
to deal with except waiters and chambermaids  and the
Ashburnhams, with whom I didn't know that I was having any
dealings.  And, as far as waiters and chambermaids were
concerned, I have generally  found that my first impressions were
correct enough. If my first idea of a  man was that he was civil,
obliging, and attentive, he generally seemed to  go on being all
those things. Once, however, at our Paris flat we had a maid  who
appeared to be charming and transparently honest. She stole, 
nevertheless, one of Florence's diamond rings. She did it, however,
to save  her young man from going to prison. So here, as somebody
says somewhere, was  a special case.

And, even in my short incursion into American business life--an
incursion  that lasted during part of August and nearly the whole of
September--I found  that to rely upon first impressions was the best
thing I could do. I found  myself automatically docketing and
labelling each man as he was introduced  to me, by the run of his
features and by the first words that he spoke. I  can't, however, be
regarded as really doing business during the time that I  spent in
the United States. I was just winding things up. If it hadn't been 
for my idea of marrying the girl I might possibly hav looked for
something  to do in my own country. For my experiences there
were vivid and amusing. It  was exactly as if I had come out of a
museum into a riotous fancy-dress  ball. During my life with
Florence I had almost come to forget that there  were such things
as fashions or occupations or the greed of gain. I had, in  fact,
forgotten that there was such a thing as a dollar and that a dollar 
can be extremely desirable if you don't happen to possess one. And
I had  forgotten, too, that there was such a thing as gossip that
mattered. In that  particular, Philadelphia was the most amazing
place I have ever been in in  my life. I was not in that city for more
than a week or ten days and I  didn't there transact anything much
in the way of business; nevertheless,  the number of times that I
was warned by everybody against everybody else  was simply
amazing. A man I didn't know would come up behind my lounge
chair  in the hotel, and, whispering cautiously beside my ear,
would warn me  against some other man that I equally didn't know
but who would be standing  by the bar. I don't know what they
thought I was there to do--perhaps to buy  out the city's debt or get
a controlling hold of some railway interest. Or,  perhaps, they
imagined that I wanted to buy a newspaper, for they were  either
politicians or reporters, which, of course, comes to the same thing. 
As a matter of fact, my property in Philadelphia was mostly real
estate in  the old-fashioned part of the city and all I wanted to do
there was just to  satisfy myself that the houses were in good repair
and the doors kept  properly painted. I wanted also to see my
relations, of whom I had a few.  These were mostly professional
people and they were mostly rather hard up  because of the big
bank failure in 1907 or thereabouts. Still, they were  very nice.
They would have been nicer still if they hadn't, all of them, had 
what appeared to me to be the mania that what they called
influences were  working against them. At any rate, the impression
of that city was one of  old-fashioned rooms, rather English than
American in type, in which handsome  but careworn ladies,
cousins of my own, talked principally about mysterious 
movements that were going on against them. I never got to know
what it was  all about; perhaps they thought I knew or perhaps
there weren't any  movements at all. It was all very secret and
subtle and subterranean. But  there was a nice young fellow called
Carter who was a sort of second-nephew  of mine, twice removed.
He was handsome and dark and gentie and tall and  modest. I
understand also that he was a good cricketer. He was employed by 
the real-estate agents who collected my rents. It was he, therefore,
who  took me over my own property and I saw a good deal of him
and of a nice girl  called Mary, to whom he was engaged. At that
time I did, what I certainly  shouldn't do now--I made some careful
inquiries as to his character. I  discovered from his employers that
he was just all that he appeared, honest,  industrious, high-spirited,
friendly and ready to do anyone a good turn. His  relatives,
however, as they were mine, too--seemed to have something
darkly  mysterious against him. I imagined that he must have been
mixed up in some  case of graft or that he had at least betrayed
several innocent and trusting  maidens. I pushed, however, that
particular mystery home and discovered it  was only that he was a
Democrat. My own people were mostly Republicans. It  seemed to
make it worse and more darkly mysterious to them that young
Carter  was what they called a sort of a Vermont Democrat which
was the whole ticket  and no mistake. But I don't know what it
means. Anyhow, I suppose that my  money will go to him when I
die--I like the recollection of his friendly  image and of the nice
girl he was engaged to. May Fate deal very kindly with  them.

I have said just now that, in my present frame of mind, nothing
would ever  make me make inquiries as to the character of any
man that I liked at first  sight. (The little digression as to my
Philadelphia experiences was really  meant to lead around to this.)
For who in this world can give anyone a  character? Who in this
world knows anything of any other heart--or of his  own? I don't
mean to say that one cannot form an average estimate of the way  a
person will behave. But one cannot be certain of the way any man
will  behave in every case--and until one can do that a "character"
is of no use  to anyone. That, for instance, was the way with
Florence's maid in Paris. We  used to trust that girl with blank
cheques for the payment of the tradesmen.  For quite a time she
was so trusted by us. Then, suddenly, she stole a ring.  We should
not have believed her capable of it; she would not have believed 
herself capable of it. It was nothing in her character. So, perhaps, it
was  with Edward Ashburnham.

Or, perhaps, it wasn't. No, I rather think it wasn't. It is difficult to 
figure out. I have said that the Kilsyte case eased the immediate
tension  for him and Leonora. It let him see that she was capable of
loyalty to him;  it gave her her chance to show that she believed in
him. She accepted  without question his statement that, in kissing
the girl, he wasn't trying  to do more than administer fatherly
comfort to a weeping child. And, indeed,  his own
world--including the magistrates--took that view of the case. 
Whatever people say, one's world can be perfectly charitable at
times . . .  But, again, as I have said, it did Edward a great deal of
harm.

That, at least, was his view of it. He assured me that, before that
case  came on and was wrangled about by counsel with all sorts of
dirty-mindedness  that counsel in that sort of case can impute, he
had not had the least idea  that he was capable of being unfaithful
to Leonora. But, in the midst of  that tumult--he says that it came
suddenly into his head whilst he was in  the witness-box--in the
midst of those august ceremonies of the law there  came suddenly
into his mind the recollection of the softness of the girl's  body as
he had pressed her to him. And, from that moment, that girl
appeared  desirable to him--and Leonora completely unattractive.

He began to indulge in day-dreams in which he approached the
nurse-maid more  tactfully and carried the matter much further.
Occasionally he thought of  other women in terms of wary
courtship--or, perhaps, it would be more exact  to say that he
thought of them in terms of tactful comforting, ending in 
absorption. That was his own view of the case. He saw himself as
the victim  of the law. I don't mean to say that he saw himself as a
kind of Dreyfus.  The law, practically, was quite kind to him. It
stated that in its view  Captain Ashburnham had been misled by an
ill-placed desire to comfort a  member of the opposite sex, and it
fined him five shilling for his want of  tact, or of knowledge of the
world. But Edward maintained that it had put  ideas into his head.

I don't believe it, though he certainly did. He was twenty-seven
then, and  his wife was out of sympathy with him--some crash was
inevitable. There was  between them a momentary rapprochement;
but it could not last. It made it,  probably, all the worse that, in that
particular matter, Leonara had come so  very well up to the
scratch. For, whilst Edward respected her more and was  grateful
to her, it made her seem by so much the more cold in other matters 
that were near his heart--his responsibilities, his career, his
tradition.  It brought his despair of her up to a point of
exasperation--and it riveted  on him the idea that he might find
some other woman who would give him the  moral support that he
needed. He wanted to be looked upon as a sort of  Lohengrin.

At that time, he says, he went about deliberately looking for some
woman who  could help him. He found several--for there were
quite a number of ladies in  his set who were capable of agreeing
with this handsome and fine fellow that  the duties of a feudal
gentleman were feudal. He would have liked to pass  his days
talking to one or other of these ladies. But there was always an 
obstacle--if the lady were married there would be a husband who
claimed the  greater part of her time and attention. If, on the other
hand, it were an  unmarried girl, he could not see very much of her
for fear of compromising  her. At that date, you understand, he had
not the least idea of seducing any  one of these ladies. He wanted
only moral support at the hands of some  female, because he found
men difficult to talk to about ideals. Indeed, I do  not believe that
he had, at any time, any idea of making any one his  mistress. That
sounds queer; but I believe it is quite true as a statement  of
character.

It was, I believe, one of Leonora's priests--a man of the world--who 
suggested that she should take him to Monte Carlo. He had the
idea that what  Edward needed, in order to fit him for the society
of Leonora, was a touch  of irresponsibility. For Edward, at that
date, had much the aspect of a  prig. I mean that, if he played polo
and was an excellent dancer he did the  one for the sake of keeping
himself fit and the other because it was a  social duty to show
himself at dances, and, when there, to dance well. He  did nothing
for fun except what he considered to be his work in life. As the 
priest saw it, this must for ever estrange him from Leonora --not
because  Leonora set much store by the joy of life, but because she
was out of  sympathy with Edward's work. On the other hand,
Leonora did like to have a  good time, now and then, and, as the
priest saw it, if Edward could be got  to like having a good time
now and then, too, there would be a bond of  sympathy between
them. It was a good idea, but it worked out wrongly.

It worked out, in fact, in the mistress of the Grand Duke. In anyone
less  sentimental than Edward that would not have mattered. With
Edward it was  fatal. For, such was his honourable nature, that for
him to enjoy a woman's  favours made him feel that she had a
bond on him for life. That was the way  it worked out in practice.
Psychologically it meant that he could not have a  mistress without
falling violently in love with her. He was a serious  person--and in
this particular case it was very expensive. The mistress of  the
Grand Duke--a Spanish dancer of passionate appearance --singled
out  Edward for her glances at a ball that was held in their
common hotel. Edward  was tall, handsome, blond and very
wealthy as she understood--and Leonora  went up to bed early. She
did not care for public dances, but she was  relieved to see that
Edward appeared to be having a good time with several  amiable
girls. And that was the end of Edward--for the Spanish dancer of 
passionate appearance wanted one night of him for his beaux yeux.
He took  her into the dark gardens and, remembering suddenly the
girl of the Kilsyte  case, he kissed her. He kissed her passionately,
violently, with a sudden  explosion of the passion that had been
bridled all his life--for Leonora was  cold, or at any rate, well
behaved. La Dolciquita liked this reversion, and  he passed the
night in her bed.

When the palpitating creature was at last asleep in his arms he
discovered  that he was madly, was passionately, was
overwhelmingly in love with her. It  was a passion that had arisen
like fire in dry corn. He could think of  nothing else; he could live
for nothing else. But La Dolciquita was a  reasonable creature
without an ounce of passion in her. She wanted a certain 
satisfaction of her appetites and Edward had appealed to her the
night  before. Now that was done with, and, quite coldly, she said
that she wanted  money if he was to have any more of her. It was a
perfectly reasonable  commercial transaction. She did not care two
buttons for Edward or for any  man and he was asking her to risk a
very good situation with the Grand Duke.  If Edward could put up
sufficient money to serve as a kind of insurance  against accident
she was ready to like Edward for a time that would be  covered, as
it were, by the policy. She was getting fifty thousand dollars a  year
from her Grand Duke; Edward would have to pay a premium of
two years'  hire for a month of her society. There would not be
much risk of the Grand  Duke's finding it out and it was not certain
that he would give her the keys  of the street if he did find out. But
there was the risk--a twenty per cent  risk, as she figured it out. She
talked to Edward as if she had been a  solicitor with an estate to
sell--perfectly quietly and perfectly coldly  without any inflections
in her voice. She did not want to be unkind to him;  but she could
see no reason for being kind to him. She was a virtuous  business
woman with a mother and two sisters and her own old age to be 
provided comfortably for. She did not expect more than a five
years' further  run. She was twenty-four and, as she said: "We
Spanish women are horrors at  thirty." Edward swore that he would
provide for her for life if she would  come to him and leave off
talking so horribly; but she only shrugged one  shoulder slowly and
contemptuously. He tried to convince this woman, who, as  he saw
it, had surrendered to him her virtue, that he regarded it as in any 
case his duty to provide for her, and to cherish her and even to love 
her--for life. In return for her sacrifice he would do that. In return, 
again, for his honourable love she would listen for ever to the
accounts of  his estate. That was how he figured it out.

She shrugged the same shoulder with the same gesture and held
out her left  hand with the elbow at her side:

"Enfin, mon ami," she said, "put in this hand the price of that tiara
at  Forli's or . . ." And she turned her back on him.

Edward went mad; his world stood on its head; the palms in front
of the blue  sea danced grotesque dances. You see, he believed in
the virtue, tenderness  and moral support of women. He wanted
more than anything to argue with La  Dolciquita; to retire with her
to an island and point out to her the  damnation of her point of
view and how salvation can only be found in true  love and the
feudal system. She had once been his mistress, he reflected,  and
by all the moral laws she ought to have gone on being his mistress
or at  the very least his sympathetic confidante. But her rooms
were closed to him;  she did not appear in the hotel. Nothing:
blank silence. To break that down  he had to have twenty thousand
pounds. You have heard what happened.  He spent a week of
madness; he hungered; his eyes sank in; he shuddered at  Leonora's
touch. I dare say that nine-tenths of what he took to be his  passion
for La Dolciquita was really discomfort at the thought that he had 
been unfaithful to Leonora. He felt uncommonly bad, that is to
say--oh,  unbearably bad, and he took it all to be love. Poor devil,
he was incredibly  nave. He drank like a fish after Leonora was in
bed and he spread himself  over the tables, and this went on for
about a fortnight. Heaven knows what  would have happened; he
would have thrown away every penny that he  possessed.

On the night after he had lost about forty thousand pounds and
whilst the  whole hotel was whispering about it, La Dolciquita
walked composedly into  his bedroom. He was too drunk to
recognize her, and she sat in his  arm-chair, knitting and holding
smelling salts to her nose--for he was  pretty far gone with
alcoholic poisoning--and, as soon as he was able to  understand
her, she said:

"Look here, mon ami, do not go to the tables again. Take a good
sleep now  and come and see me this afternoon."

He slept till the lunch-hour. By that time Leonora had heard the
news. A Mrs  Colonel Whelan had told her. Mrs Colonel Whelan
seems to have been the only  sensible person who was ever
connected with the Ashburnhams. She had argued  it out that there
must be a woman of the harpy variety connected with  Edward's
incredible behaviour and mien; and she advised Leonora to go 
straight off to Town--which might have the effect of bringing
Edward to his  senses--and to consult her solicitor and her spiritual
adviser. She had  better go that very morning; it was no good
arguing with a man in Edward's  condition.

Edward, indeed, did not know that she had gone. As soon as he
awoke he went  straight to La Dolciquita's room and she stood him
his lunch in her own  apartments. He fell on her neck and wept,
and she put up with it for a time.  She was quite a good-natured
woman. And, when she had calmed him down with  Eau de
Mlisse, she said:  "Look here, my friend, how much money have
you left? Five thousand dollars?  Ten?" For the rumour went that
Edward had lost two kings' ransoms a night  for fourteen nights
and she imagined that he must be near the end of his  resources.

The Eau de Mlisse had calmed Edward to such an extent that, for
the moment,  he really had a head on his shoulders. He did nothing
more than grunt:

"And then?"

"Why," she answered, "I may just as well have the ten thousand
dollars as  the tables. I will go with you to Antibes for a week for
that sum."

Edward grunted: "Five." She tried to get seven thousand five
hundred; but he  stuck to his five thousand and the hotel expenses
at Antibes. The sedative  carried him just as far as that and then he
collapsed again. He had to leave  for Antibes at three; he could not
do without it. He left a note for Leonora  saying that he had gone
off for a week with the Clinton Morleys, yachting.

He did not enjoy himself very much at Antibes. La Dolciquita
could talk of  nothing with any enthusiasm except money, and she
tired him unceasingly,  during every waking hour, for presents of
the most expensive description.  And, at the end of a week, she just
quietly kicked him out. He hung about in  Antibes for three days.
He was cured of the idea that he had any duties  towards La
Dolciquita--feudal or otherwise. But his sentimentalism required 
of him an attitude of Byronic gloom--as if his court had gone into 
half-mourning. Then his appetite suddenly returned, and he
remembered  Leonora. He found at his hotel at Monte Carlo a
telegram from Leonora,  dispatched from London, saying; "Please
return as soon as convenient." He  could not understand why
Leonora should have abandoned him so precipitately  when she
only thought that he had gone yachting with the Clinton Morleys. 
Then he discovered that she had left the hotel before he had
written the  note. He had a pretty rocky journey back to town; he
was frightened out of  his life--and Leonora had never seemed so
desirable to him.

V I CALL this the Saddest Story, rather than "The Ashburnham
Tragedy", just  because it is so sad, just because there was no
current to draw things along  to a swift and inevitable end. There is
about it none of the elevation that  accompanies tragedy; there is
about it no nemesis, no destiny. Here were two  noble people--for I
am convinced that both Edward and Leonora had noble 
natures--here, then, were two noble natures, drifting down life, like 
fireships afloat on a lagoon and causing miseries, heart-aches,
agony of the  mind and death. And they themselves steadily
deteriorated. And why? For what  purpose? To point what lesson?
It is all a darkness.

There is not even any villain in the story--for even Major Basil, the 
husband of the lady who next, and really, comforted the
unfortunate Edward  --even Major Basil was not a villain in this
piece. He was a slack, loose,  shiftless sort of fellow--but he did
not do anything to Edward. Whilst they  were in the same station
in Burma he borrowed a good deal of money--though,  really, since
Major Basil had no particular vices, it was difficult to know  why
he wanted it. He collected--different types of horses' bits from the 
earliest times to the present day--but, since he did not prosecute
even this  occupation with any vigour, he cannot have needed
much money for the  acquirement, say, of the bit of Genghis
Khan's charger--if Genghis Khan had  a charger. And when I say
that he borrowed a good deal of money from Edward  I do not
mean to say that he had more than a thousand pounds from him
during  the five years that the connection lasted. Edward, of
course, did not have a  great deal of money; Leonora was seeing to
that. Still, he may have had five  hundred pounds a year English,
for his menus plaisirs--for his regimental  subscriptions and for
keeping his men smart. Leonora hated that; she would  have
preferred to buy dresses for herself or to have devoted the money
to  paying off a mortgage. Still, with her sense of justice, she saw
that, since  she was managing a property bringing in three
thousand a year with a view to  re-establishing it as a property of
five thousand a year and since the  property really, if not legally,
belonged to Edward, it was reasonable and  just that Edward
should get a slice of his own. Of course she had the devil  of a job.

I don't know that I have got the financial details exactly right. I am
a  pretty good head at figures, but my mind, still, sometimes mixes
up pounds  with dollars and I get a figure wrong. Anyhow, the
proposition was something  like this: Properly worked and without
rebates to the tenants and keeping up  schools and things, the
Branshaw estate should have brought in about five  thousand a
year when Edward had it. It brought in actually about four. (I am 
talking in pounds, not dollars.) Edward's excesses with the Spanish
Lady had  reduced its value to about three--as the maximum figure,
without reductions.  Leonora wanted to get it back to five.

She was, of course, very young to be faced with such a 
proposition--twenty-four is not a very advanced age. So she did
things with  a youthful vigour that she would, very likely, have
made more merciful, if  she had known more about life. She got
Edward remarkably on the hop. He had  to face her in a London
hotel, when he crept back from Monte Carlo with his  poor tail
between his poor legs. As far as I can make out she cut short his 
first mumblings and his first attempts at affectionate speech with
words  something like:  "We're on the verge of ruin. Do you intend
to let me pull things together?  If not I shall retire to Hendon on
my jointure." (Hendon represented a  convent to which she
occasionally went for what is called a "retreat" in  Catholic
circles.) And poor dear Edward knew nothing--absolutely nothing.
He did not know how  much money he had, as he put it, "blued" at
the tables. It might have been a  quarter of a million for all he
remembered. He did not know whether she knew  about La
Dolciquita or whether she imagined that he had gone off yachting
or  had stayed at Monte Carlo. He was just dumb and he just
wanted to get into a  hole and not have to talk. Leonora did not
make him talk and she said  nothing herself.

I do not know much about English legal procedure--I cannot, I
mean, give  technical details of how they tied him up. But I know
that, two days later,  without her having said more than I have
reported to you, Leonora and her  attorney had become the
trustees, as I believe it is called, of all Edward's  property, and
there was an end of Edward as the good landlord and father of  his
people. He went out. Leonora then had three thousand a year at her 
disposal. She occupied Edward with getting himself transferred to
a part of  his regiment that was in Burma--if that is the right way to
put it. She  herself had an interview, lasting a week or so--with
Edward's land-steward.  She made him understand that the estate
would have to yield up to its last  penny. Before they left for India
she had let Branshaw for seven years at a  thousand a year. She
sold two Vandykes and a little silver for eleven  thousand pounds
and she raised, on mortgage, twenty-nine thousand. That went  to
Edward's money-lending friends in Monte Carlo. So she had to get
the  twenty-nine thousand back, for she did not regard the
Vandykes and the  silver as things she would have to replace. They
were just frills to the  Ashburnham vanity. Edward cried for two
days over the disappearance of his  ancestors and then she wished
she had not done it; but it did not teach her  anything and it
lessened such esteem as she had for him. She did not also 
understand that to let Branshaw affected him with a feeling of
physical  soiling--that it was almost as bad for him as if a woman
belonging to him  had become a prostitute. That was how it did
affect him; but I dare say she  felt just as bad about the Spanish
dancer.

So she went at it. They were eight years in India, and during the
whole of  that time she insisted that they must be
self-supporting--they had to live  on his Captain's pay, plus the
extra allowance for being at the front. She  gave him the five
hundred a year for Ashburnham frills, as she called it to 
herself--and she considered she was doing him very well.

Indeed, in a way, she did him very well--but it was not his way.
She was  always buying him expensive things which, as it were,
she took off her own  back. I have, for instance, spoken of
Edward's leather cases. Well, they  were not Edward's at all; they
were Leonora's manifestations. He liked to be  clean, but he
preferred, as it were, to be threadbare. She never understood  that,
and all that pigskin was her idea of a reward to him for putting her 
up to a little speculation by which she made eleven hundred
pounds. She did,  herself, the threadbare business. When they went
up to a place called Simla,  where, as I understand, it is cool in the
summer and very social--when they  went up to Simla for their
healths it was she who had him prancing around,  as we should say
in the United States, on a thousand-dollar horse with the  gladdest
of glad rags all over him. She herself used to go into "retreat". I 
believe that was very good for her health and it was also very
inexpensive.

It was probably also very good for Edward's health, because he
pranced about  mostly with Mrs Basil, who was a nice woman and
very, very kind to him. I  suppose she was his mistress, but I never
heard it from Edward, of course. I  seem to gather that they carried
it on in a high romantic fashion, very  proper to both of them--or,
at any rate, for Edward; she seems to have been  a tender and
gentle soul who did what he wanted. I do not mean to say that  she
was without character; that was her job, to do what Edward
wanted. So I  figured it out, that for those five years, Edward
wanted long passages of  deep affection kept up in long, long talks
and that every now and then they  "fell," which would give Edward
an opportunity for remorse and an excuse to  lend the Major
another fifty. I don't think that Mrs Basil considered it to  be
"falling"; she just pitied him and loved him.

You see, Leonora and Edward had to talk about something during
all these  years. You cannot be absolutely dumb when you live
with a person unless you  are an inhabitant of the North of England
or the State of Maine. So Leonora  imagined the cheerful device of
letting him see the accounts of his estate  and discussing them with
him. He did not discuss them much; he was trying to  behave
prettily. But it was old Mr Mumford--the farmer who did not pay
his  rent--that threw Edward into Mrs Basil's arms. Mrs Basil came
upon Edward in  the dusk, in the Burmese garden, with all sorts of
flowers and things. And  he was cutting up that crop--with his
sword, not a walking-stick. He was  also carrying on and cursing in
a way you would not believe.

She ascertained that an old gentleman called Mumford had been
ejected from  his farm and had been given a little cottage rent-free,
where he lived on  ten shillings a week from a farmers' benevolent
society, supplemented by  seven that was being allowed him by the
Ashburnham trustees. Edward had just  discovered that fact from
the estate accounts. Leonora had left them in his  dressing-room
and he had begun to read them before taking off his  marching-kit.
That was how he came to have a sword. Leonora considered that 
she had been unusually generous to old Mr Mumford in allowing
him to inhabit  a cottage, rent-free, and in giving him seven
shillings a week. Anyhow, Mrs  Basil had never seen a man in
such a state as Edward was. She had been  passionately in love
with him for quite a time, and he had been longing for  her
sympathy and admiration with a passion as deep. That was how
they came  to speak about it, in the Burmese garden, under the pale
sky, with sheaves  of severed vegetation, misty and odorous, in the
night around their feet. I  think they behaved themselves with
decorum for quite a time after that,  though Mrs Basil spent so
many hours over the accounts of the Ashburnham  estate that she
got the name of every field by heart. Edward had a huge map  of
his lands in his harness-room and Major Basil did not seem to
mind. I  believe that people do not mind much in lonely stations. 
It might have lasted for ever if the Major had not been made what
is called  a brevet-colonel during the shuffling of troops that went
on just before the  South African War. He was sent off somewhere
else and, of course, Mrs Basil  could not stay with Edward.
Edward ought, I suppose, to have gone to the  Transvaal. It would
have done him a great deal of good to get killed. But  Leonora
would not let him; she had heard awful stories of the extravagance 
of the hussar regiment in war-time--how they left hundred-bottle
cases of  champagne, at five guineas a bottle, on the veldt and so
on. Besides, she  preferred to see how Edward was spending his
five hundred a year. I don't  mean to say that Edward had any
grievance in that. He was never a man of the  deeds of heroism sort
and it was just as good for him to be sniped at up in  the hills of
the North Western frontier, as to be shot at by an old  gentleman in
a tophat at the bottom of some spruit. Those are more or less  his
words about it. I believe he quite distinguished himself over there.
At  any rate, he had had his D.S.O. and was made a brevet-major.
Leonora,  however, was not in the least keen on his soldiering. She
hated also his  deeds of heroism. One of their bitterest quarrels
came after he had, for the  second time, in the Red Sea, jumped
overboard from the troopship and rescued  a private soldier. She
stood it the first time and even complimented him.  But the Red
Sea was awful, that trip, and the private soldiers seemed to 
develop a suicidal craze. It got on Leonora's nerves; she figured
Edward,  for the rest of that trip, jumping overboard every ten
minutes. And the mere  cry of "Man overboard" is a disagreeable,
alarming and disturbing thing. The  ship gets stopped and there are
all sorts of shouts. And Edward would not  promise not to do it
again, though, fortunately, they struck a streak of  cooler weather
when they were in the Persian Gulf. Leonora had got it into  her
head that Edward was trying to commit suicide, so I guess it was
pretty  awful for her when he would not give the promise. Leonora
ought never to  have been on that troopship; but she got there
somehow, as an economy.

Major Basil discovered his wife's relation with Edward just before
he was  sent to his other station. I don't know whether that was a
blackmailer's  adroitness or just a trick of destiny. He may have
known of it all the time  or he may not. At any rate, he got hold of,
just about then, some letters  and things. It cost Edward three
hundred pounds immediately. I do not know  how it was arranged;
I cannot imagine how even a blackmailer can make his  demands. I
suppose there is some sort of way of saving your face. I figure  the
Major as disclosing the letters to Edward with furious oaths, then 
accepting his explanations that the letters were perfectly innocent
if the  wrong construction were not put upon them. Then the Major
would say: "I say,  old chap, I'm deuced hard up. Couldn't you lend
me three hundred or so?" I  fancy that was how it was. And, year
by year, after that there would come a  letter from the Major,
saying that he was deuced hard up and couldn't Edward  lend him
three hundred or so?  Edward was pretty hard hit when Mrs Basil
had to go away. He really had been  very fond of her, and he
remained faithful to her memory for quite a long  time. And Mrs
Basi had loved him very much and continued to cherish a hope  of
reunion with him. Three days ago there came a quite proper but
very  lamentable letter from her to Leonora, asking to be given
particulars as to  Edward's death. She had read the advertisement
of it in an Indian paper. I  think she must have been a very nice
woman. . . .

And then the Ashburnhams were moved somewhere up towards a
place or a  district called Chitral. I am no good at geography of the
Indian Empire. By  that time they had settled down into a model
couple and they never spoke in  private to each other. Leonora had
given up even showing the accounts of the  Ashburnham estate to
Edward. He thought that that was because she had piled  up such a
lot of money that she did not want him to know how she was
getting  on any more. But, as a matter of fact, after five or six years
it had  penetrated to her mind that it was painful to Edward to have
to look on at  the accounts of his estate and have no hand in the
management of it. She was  trying to do him a kindness. And, up in
Chitral, poor dear little Maisie  Maidan came along. . . .

That was the most unsettling to Edward of all his affairs. It made
him  suspect that he was inconstant. The affair with the Dolciquita
he had sized  up as a short attack of madness like hydrophobia. His
relations with Mrs  Basil had not seemed to him to imply moral
turpitude of a gross kind. The  husband had been complaisant; they
had really loved each other; his wife was  very cruel to him and
had long ceased to be a wife to him. He thought that  Mrs Basil
had been his soul-mate, separated from him by an unkind 
fate--something sentimental of that sort.

But he discovered that, whilst he was still writing long weekly
letters to  Mrs Basil, he was beginning to be furiously impatient if
he missed seeing  Maisie Maidan during the course of the day. He
discovered himself watching  the doorways with impatience; he
discovered that he disliked her boy husband  very much for hours
at a time. He discovered that he was getting up at  unearthly hours
in order to have time, later in the morning, to go for a  walk with
Maisie Maidan. He discovered himself using little slang words that 
she used and attaching a sentimental value to those words. These,
you  understand, were discoveries that came so late that he could
do nothing but  drift. He was losing weight; his eyes were
beginning to fall in; he had  touches of bad fever. He was, as he
described it, pipped.

And, one ghastly hot day, he suddenly heard himself say to
Leonora:

"I say, couldn't we take Mrs Maidan with us to Europe and drop
her at  Nauheim?"

He hadn't had the least idea of saying that to Leonora. He had
merely been  standing, looking at an illustrated paper, waiting for
dinner. Dinner was  twenty minutes late or the Ashburnhams
would not have been alone together.  No, he hadn't had the least
idea of framing that speech. He had just been  standing in a silent
agony of fear, of longing, of heat, of fever. He was  thinking that
they were going back to Branshaw in a month and that Maisie 
Maidan was going to remain behind and die. And then, that had
come out.

The punkah swished in the darkened room; Leonora lay exhausted
and  motionless in her cane lounge; neither of them stirred. They
were both at  that time very ill in indefinite ways.

And then Leonora said:

"Yes. I promised it to Charlie Maidan this afternoon. I have
offered to pay  her ex's myself."

Edward just saved himself from saying: "Good God!" You see, he
had not the  least idea of what Leonora knew--about Maisie, about
Mrs Basil, even about  La Dolciquita. It was a pretty enigmatic
situation for him. It struck him  that Leonora must be intending to
manage his loves as she managed his money  affairs and it made
her more hateful to him--and more worthy of respect.

Leonora, at any rate, had managed his money to some purpose. She
had spoken  to him, a week before, for the first time in several
years--about money. She  had made twenty-two thousand pounds
out of the Branshaw land and seven by  the letting of Branshaw
furnished. By fortunate investments--in which Edward  had helped
her--she had made another six or seven thousand that might well 
become more. The mortgages were all paid off, so that, except for
the  departure of the two Vandykes and the silver, they were as
well off as they  had been before the Dolciquita had acted the
locust. It was Leonora's great  achievement. She laid the figures
before Edward, who maintained an unbroken  silence.

"I propose," she said, "that you should resign from the Army and
that we  should go back to Branshaw. We are both too ill to stay
here any longer."

Edward said nothing at all.

"This," Leonora continued passionlessly, "is the great day of my
life."

Edward said:

"You have managed the job amazingly. You are a wonderful
woman." He was  thinking that if they went back to Branshaw they
would leave Maisie Maidan  behind. That thought occupied him
exclusively. They must, undoubtedly,  return to Branshaw; there
could be no doubt that Leonora was too ill to stay  in that place.
She said:

"You understand that the management of the whole of the
expenditure of the  income will be in your hands. There will be
five thousand a year."  She thought that he cared very much about
the expenditure of an income of  five thousand a year and that the
fact that she had done so much for him  would rouse in him some
affection for her. But he was thinking exclusively  of Maisie
Maidan--of Maisie, thousands of miles away from him. He was
seeing  the mountains between them--blue mountains and the sea
and sunlit plains. He  said:

"That is very generous of you." And she did not know whether that
were  praise or a sneer. That had been a week before. And all that
week he had  passed in an increasing agony at the thought that
those mountains, that sea,  and those sunlit plains would be
between him and Maisie Maidan. That thought  shook him in the
burning nights: the sweat poured from him and he trembled  with
cold, in the burning noons--at that thought. He had no minute's
rest;  his bowels turned round and round within him: his tongue
was perpetually dry  and it seemed to him that the breath between
his teeth was like air from a  pest-house.

He gave no thought to Leonora at all; he had sent in his papers.
They were  to leave in a month. It seemed to him to be his duty to
leave that place and  to go away, to support Leonora. He did his
duty.

It was horrible, in their relationship at that time, that whatever she
did  caused him to hate her. He hated her when he found that she
proposed to set  him up as the Lord of Branshaw again--as a sort of
dummy lord, in swaddling  clothes. He imagined that she had done
this in order to separate him from  Maisie Maidan. Hatred hung in
all the heavy nights and filled the shadowy  corners of the room.
So when he heard that she had offered to the Maidan boy  to take
his wife to Europe with him, automatically he hated her since he 
hated all that she did. It seemed to him, at that time, that she could
never  be other than cruel even if, by accident, an act of hers were
kind. . . .  Yes, it was a horrible situation.

But the cool breezes of the ocean seemed to clear up that hatred as
if it  had been a curtain. They seemed to give him back admiration
for her, and  respect. The agreeableness of having money lavishly
at command, the fact  that it had bought for him the
companionship of Maisie Maidan--these things  began to make
him see that his wife might have been right in the starving  and
scraping upon which she had insisted. He was at ease; he was even 
radiantly happy when he carried cups of bouillon for Maisie
Maidan along the  deck. One night, when he was leaning beside
Leonora, over the ship's side,  he said suddenly:

"By jove, you're the finest woman in the world. I wish we could be
better  friends."

She just turned away without a word and went to her cabin. Still,
she was  very much better in health.

 And now, I suppose, I must give you Leonora's side of the case. . .
.
That is very difficult. For Leonora, if she preserved an unchanged
front,  changed very frequently her point of view. She had been
drilled-- in her  tradition, in her upbringing--to keep her mouth
shut. But there were times,  she said, when she was so near
yielding to the temptation of speaking that  afterwards she
shuddered to think of those times. You must postulate that  what
she desired above all things was to keep a shut mouth to the world;
to  Edward and to the women that he loved. If she spoke she would
despise  herself.

From the moment of his unfaithfulness with La Dolciquita she
never acted the  part of wife to Edward. It was not that she
intended to keep herself from  him as a principle, for ever. Her
spiritual advisers, I believe, forbade  that. But she stipulated that
he must, in some way, perhaps symbolical, come  back to her. She
was not very clear as to what she meant; probably she did  not
know herself. Or perhaps she did.

There were moments when he seemed to be coming back to her;
there were  moments when she was within a hair of yielding to her
physical passion for  him. In just the same way, at moments, she
almost yielded to the temptation  to denounce Mrs Basil to her
husband or Maisie Maidan to hers. She desired  then to cause the
horrors and pains of public scandals. For, watching Edward  more
intently and with more straining of ears than that which a cat
bestows  upon a bird overhead, she was aware of the progress of
his passion for each  of these ladies. She was aware of it from the
way in which his eyes returned  to doors and gateways; she knew
from his tranquillities when he had received  satisfactions.

At times she imagined herself to see more than was warranted. She
imagined  that Edward was carrying on intrigues with other
women--with two at once;  with three. For whole periods she
imagined him to be a monster of  libertinage and she could not see
that he could have anything against her.  She left him his liberty;
she was starving herself to build up his fortunes;  she allowed
herself none of the joys of femininity--no dresses, no 
jewels--hardly even friendships, for fear they should cost money.

And yet, oddly, she could not but be aware that both Mrs Basil and
Maisie  Maidan were nice women. The curious, discounting eye
which one woman can  turn on another did not prevent her seeing
that Mrs Basil was very good to  Edward and Mrs Maidan very
good for him. That seemed her to be a monstrous  and
incomprehensible working of Fate's. Incomprehensible! Why, she
asked  herself again and again, did none of the good deeds that she
did for her  husband ever come through to him, or appear to hime
as good deeds? By what  trick of mania could not he let her be as
good to him as Mrs Basil was? Mrs  Basil was not so
extraordinarily dissimilar to herself. She was, it was  true, tall,
dark, with soft mournful voice and a great kindness of manner  for
every created thing, from punkah men to flowers on the trees. But
she  was not so well read as Lenora, at any rate in learned books.
Leonora could  not stand novels. But, even with all her differences,
Mrs Basil did not  appear to Leonora to differ so very much from
herself. She was truthful,  honest and, for the rest, just a woman.
And Leonora had a vague sort of idea  that, to a man, all women
are the same after three weeks of close  intercourse. She thought
that the kindness should no longer appeal, the soft  and mournful
voice no longer thrill, the tall darkness no longer give a man  the
illusion that he was going into the depths of an unexplored wood.
She  could not understand how Edward could go on and on
maundering over Mrs  Basil. She could not see why he should
continue to write her long letters  after their separation. After that,
indeed, she had a very bad time.

She had at that period what I will call the "monstrous" theory of
Edward.  She was always imagining him ogling at every woman
that he came across. She  did not, that year, go into "retreat" at
Simla because she was afraid that  he would corrupt her maid in
her absence. She imagined him carrying on  intrigues with native
women or Eurasians. At dances she was in a fever of 
watchfulness.

She persuaded herself that this was because she had a dread of
scandals.  Edward might get himself mixed up with a marriageable
daughter of some man  who would make a row or some husband
who would matter. But, really, she  acknowledged afterwards to
herself, she was hoping that, Mrs Basil being out  of the way, the
time might have come when Edward should return to her. All  that
period she passed in an agony of jealousy and fear--the fear that 
Edward might really become promiscuous in his habits.

So that, in an odd way, she was glad when Maisie Maidan came
along--and she  realized that she had not, before, been afraid of
husbands and of scandals,  since, then, she did her best to keep
Maisie's husband unsuspicious. She  wished to appear so trustful of
Edward that Maidan could not possibly have  any suspicions. It
was an evil position for her. But Edward was very ill and  she
wanted to see him smile again. She thought that if he could smile
again  through her agency he might return, through gratitude and
satisfied love--to  her. At that time she thought that Edward was a
person of light and fleeting  passions. And she could understand
Edward's passion for Maisie, since Maisie  was one of those
women to whom other women will allow magnetism.  She was
very pretty; she was very young; in spite of her heart she was very 
gay and light on her feet. And Leonora was really very fond of
Maisie, who  was fond enough of Leonora. Leonora, indeed,
imagined that she could manage  this affair all right. She had no
thought of Maisie's being led into  adultery; she imagined that if
she could take Maisie and Edward to Nauheim,  Edward would see
enough of her to get tired of her pretty little  chatterings, and of the
pretty little motions of her hands and feet. And she  thought she
could trust Edward. For there was not any doubt of Maisie's 
passion for Edward. She raved about him to Leonora as Leonora
had heard  girls rave about drawing masters in schools. She was
perpetually asking her  boy husband why he could not dress, ride,
shoot, play polo, or even recite  sentimental poems, like their
major. And young Maidan had the greatest  admiration for
Edward, and he adored, was bewildered by and entirely trusted  his
wife. It appeared to him that Edward was devoted to Leonora. And
Leonora  imagined that when poor Maisie was cured of her hear
and Edward had seen  enough of her, he would return to her. She
had the vague, passionate idea  that, when Edward had exhausted a
number of other types of women he must  turn to her. Why should
not her type have its turn in his heart? She  imagined that, by now,
she understood him better, that she understood better  his vanities
and that, by making him happier, she could arouse his love.

Florence knocked all that on the head. . . . 

 PART IV

I 

I HAVE, I am aware, told this story in a very rambling way so that
it may be  difficult for anyone to find their path through what may
be a sort of maze.  I cannot help it. I have stuck to my idea of
being in a country cottage with  a silent listener, hearing between
the gusts of the wind and amidst the  noises of the distant sea, the
story as it comes. And, when one discusses an  affair--a long, sad
affair--one goes back, one goes forward. One remembers  points
that one has forgotten and one explains them all the more minutely 
since one recognizes that one has forgotten to mention them in
their proper  places and that one may have given, by omitting
them, a false impression. I  console myself with thinking that this
is a real story and that, after all,  real stories are probably told best
in the way a person telling a story  would tell them. They will then
seem most real.

At any rate, I think I have brought my story up to the date of
Maisie  Maidan's death. I mean that I have explained everything
that went before it  from the several points of view that were
necessary--from Leonora's, from  Edward's and, to some extent,
from my own. You have the facts for the  trouble of finding them;
you have the points of view as far as I could  ascertain or put them.
Let me imagine myself back, then, at the day of  Maisie's death--or
rather at the moment of Florence's dissertation on the  Protest, up
in the old Castle of the town of M----. Let us consider  Leonora's
point of view with regard to Florence; Edward's, of course, I 
cannot give you, for Edward naturally never spoke of his affair
with my  wife. (I may, in what follows, be a little hard on Florence;
but you must  remember that I have been writing away at this story
now for six months and  reflecting longer and longer upon these
affairs.)  And the longer I think about them the more certain I
become that Florence  was a contaminating influence--she
depressed and deteriorated poor Edward;  she deteriorated,
hopelessly, the miserable Leonora. There is no doubt that  she
caused Leonora's character to deteriorate. If there was a fine point 
about Leonora it was that she was proud and that she was silent.
But that  pride and that silence broke when she made that
extraordinary outburst, in  the shadowy room that contained the
Protest, and in the little terrace  looking over the river. I don't
mean to say that she was doing a wrong  thing. She was certainly
doing right in trying to warn me that Florence was  making eyes at
her husband. But, if she did the right thing, she was doing  it in the
wrong way. Perhaps she should have reflected longer; she should 
have spoken, if she wanted to speak, only after reflection. Or it
would have  been better if she had acted--if, for instance, she had
so chaperoned  Florence that private communication between her
and Edward became  impossible. She should have gone
eavesdropping; she should have watched  outside bedroom doors.
It is odious; but that is the way the job is done.  She should have
taken Edward away the moment Maisie was dead. No, she acted 
wrongly. . . . And yet, poor thing, is it for me to condemn her--and
what  did it matter in the end? If it had not been Florence, it would
have been  some other . . . Still, it might have been a better woman
than my wife. For  Florence was vulgar; Florence was a common
flirt who would not, at the last,  lacher prise; and Florence was an
unstoppable talker. You could not stop  her; nothing would stop
her. Edward and Leonora were at least proud and  reserved people.
Pride and reserve are not the only things in life; perhaps  they are
not even the best things. But if they happen to be your particular 
virtues you will go all to pieces if you let them go. And Leonora let
them.  go. She let them go before poor Edward did even. Consider
her position when  she burst out over the Luther-Protest. . . .
Consider her agonies. . . .

You are to remember that the main passion of her life was to get
Edward  back; she had never, till that moment, despaired of getting
him back. That  may seem ignoble; but you have also to remember
that her getting him back  represented to her not only a victory for
herself. It would, as it appeared  to her, have been a victory for all
wives and a victory for her Church. That  was how it presented
itself to her. These things are a little inscrutable. I  don't know why
the getting back of Edward should have represented to her a 
victory for all wives, for Society and for her Church. Or, maybe, I
have a  glimmering of it.  She saw life as a perpetual sex-baffle
between husbands who desire to be  unfaithful to their wives, and
wives who desire to recapture their husbands  in the end. That was
her sad and modest view of matrimony. Man, for her, was  a sort
of brute who must have his divagations, his moments of excess, his 
nights out, his, let us say, rutting seasons. She had read few novels,
so  that the idea of a pure and constant love succeeding the sound
of wedding  bells had never been very much presented to her. She
went, numbed and  terrified, to the Mother Superior of her
childhood's convent with the tale  of Edward's infidelities with the
Spanish dancer, and all that the old nun,  who appeared to her to
be infinitely wise, mystic and reverend, had done had  been to
shake her head sadly and to say:

"Men are like that. By the blessing of God it will all come right in
the  end."

That was what was put before her by her spiritual advisers as her
programme  in life. Or, at any rate, that was how their teachings
came through to  her--that was the lesson she told me she had
learned of them. I don't know  exactly what they taught her. The lot
of women was patience and patience and  again patience--ad
majorem Dei gloriam--until upon the appointed day, if God  saw
fit, she should have her reward. If then, in the end, she should have 
succeeded in getting Edward back she would have kept her man
within the  limits that are all that wifehood has to expect. She was
even taught that  such excesses in men are natural, excusable--as if
they had been children.

And the great thing was that there should be no scandal before the 
congregation. So she had clung to the idea of getting Edward back
with a  fierce passion that was like an agony. She had looked the
other way; she had  occupied herself solely with one idea. That
was the idea of having Edward  appear, when she did get him
back, wealthy, glorious as it were, on account  of his lands, and
upright. She would show, in fact, that in an unfaithful  world one
Catholic woman had succeeded in retaining the fidelity of her 
husband. And she thought she had come near her desires.

Her plan with regard to Maisie had appeared to be working
admirably. Edward  had seemed to be cooling off towards the girl.
He did not hunger to pass  every minute of the time at Nauheirn
beside the child's recumbent form; he  went out to polo matches;
he played auction bridge in the evenings; he was  cheerful and
bright. She was certain that he was not trying to seduce that  poor
child; she was beginning to think that he had never tried to do so.
He  seemed in fact to be dropping back into what he had been for
Maisie in the  beginning--a kind, attentive, superior officer in the
regiment, paying  gallant attentions to a bride. They were as open
in their little flirtations  as the dayspring from on high. And Maisie
had not appeared to fret when he  went off on excursions with us;
she had to lie down for so many hours on her  bed every afternoon,
and she had not appeared to crave for the attentions of  Edward at
those times. And Edward was beginning to make little advances to 
Leonora. Once or twice, in private--for he often did it before
people--he  had said: "How nice you look!" or "What a pretty
dress!" She had gone with  Florence to Frankfurt, where they dress
as well as in Paris, and had got  herself a gown or two. She could
afford it, and Florence was an excellent  adviser as to dress. She
seemed to have got hold of the clue to the riddle.

Yes, Leonora seemed to have got hold of the clue to the riddle. She
imagined  herself to have been in the wrong to some extent in the
past. She should not  have kept Edward on such a tight rein with
regard to money. She thought she  was on the right tack in letting
him--as she had done only with fear and  irresolution--have again
the control of bis income. He came even a step  towards her and
acknowledged, spontaneously, that she had been right in 
husbanding, for all those years, their resources. He said to her one
day:

"You've done right, old girl. There's nothing I like so much as to
have a  little to chuck away. And I can do it, thanks to you."

That was really, she said, the happiest moment of her life. And he,
seeming  to realize it, had ventured to pat her on the shoulder. He
had, ostensibly,  come in to borrow a safety-pin of her. And the
occasion of her boxing  Maisie's ears, had, after it was over,
riveted in her mind the idea that  there was no intrigue between
Edward and Mrs Maidan. She imagined that, from  henceforward,
all that she had to do was to keep him well supplied with  money
and his mind amused with pretty girls. She was convinced that he
was  coming back to her. For that month she no longer repelled his
timid advances  that never went very far. For he certainly made
timid advances. He patted  her on the shoulder; he whispered into
her ear little jokes about the odd  figures that they saw up at the
Casino. It was not much to make a little  joke--but the whispering
of it was a precious intimacy. . . .

And then--smash--it all went. It went to pieces at the moment
when Florence  laid her hand upon Edward's wrist, as it lay on the
glass sheltering the  manuscript of the Protest, up in the high tower
with the shutters where the  sunlight here and there streamed in.
Or, rather, it went when she noticed  the look in Edward's eyes as
he gazed back into Florence's. She knew that  look.

She had known--since the first moment of their meeting, since the
moment of  our all sitting down to dinner together--that Florence
was making eyes at  Edward. But she had seen so many women
make eyes at Edward--hundreds and  hundreds of women, in
railway trains, in hotels, aboard liners, at street  corners. And she
had arrived at thinking that Edward took little stock in  women
that made eyes at him. She had formed what was, at that time, a
fairly  correct estimate of the methods of, the reasons for, Edward's
loves. She was  certain that hitherto they had consisted of the short
passion for the  Dolciquita, the real sort of love for Mrs Basil, and
what she deemed the  pretty courtship of Maisie Maidan. Besides
she despised Florence so  haughtily that she could not imagine
Edward's being attracted by her. And  she and Maisie were a sort
of bulwark round him. She wanted, besides, to  keep her eyes on
Florence--for Florence knew that she had boxed Maisie's  ears.
And Leonora desperately desired that her union with Edward
should  appear to be flawless. But all that went. . . .

With the answering gaze of Edward into Florence's blue and
uplifted eyes,  she knew that it had all gone. She knew that that
gaze meant that those two  had had long conversations of an
intimate kind--about their likes and  dislikes, about their natures,
about their views of marriage. She knew what  it meant that she,
when we all four walked out together, had always been  with me
ten yards ahead of Florence and Edward. She did not imagine that
it  had gone further than talks about their likes and dislikes, about
their  natures or about marriage as an institution. But, having
watched Edward all  her life, she knew that that laying on of
hands, that answering of gaze with  gaze, meant that the thing was
unavoidable. Edward was such a serious  person.

She knew that any attempt on her part to separate those two would
be to  rivet on Edward an irrevocable passion; that, as I have
before told you, it  was a trick of Edward's nature to believe that
the seducing of a woman gave  her an irrevocable hold over him
for life. And that touching of hands, she  knew, would give that
woman an irrevocable claim--to be seduced. And she so  despised
Florence that she would have preferred it to be a parlour-maid. 
There are very decent parlour-maids.

And, suddenly, there came into her mind the conviction that
Maisie Maidan  had a real passion for Edward; that this would
break her heart--and that  she, Leonora, would be responsible for
that. She went, for the moment, mad.  She clutched me by the
wrist; she dragged me down those stairs and across  that
whispering Rittersaal with the high painted pillars, the high
painted  chimney-piece. I guess she did not go mad enough.

She ought to have said:

"Your wife is a harlot who is going to be my husband's mistress . .
." That  might have done the trick. But, even in her madness, she
was afraid to go as  far as that. She was afraid that, if she did,
Edward and Florence would make  a bolt of it, and that, if they did
that, she would lose forever all chance  of getting him back in the
end. She acted very badly to me.

Well, she was a tortured soul who put her Church before the
interests of a  Philadelphia Quaker. That is all right--I daresay the
Church of Rome is the  more important of the two.

A week after Maisie Maidan's death she was aware that Florence
had become  Edward's mistress. She waited outside Florence's door
and met Edward as he  came away. She said nothing and he only
grunted. But I guess he had a bad  time.

Yes, the mental deterioration that Florence worked in Leonora was 
extraordinary; it smashed up her whole life and all her chances. It
made  her, in the first place, hopeless--for she could not see how,
after that,  Edward could return to her--after a vulgar intrigue with
a vulgar woman. His  affair with Mrs Basil, which was now all that
she had to bring, in her  heart, against him, she could not find it in
her to call an intrigue. It was  a love affair--a pure enough thing in
its way. But this seemed to her to be  a horror--a wantonness, all
the more detestable to her, because she so  detested Florence. And
Florence talked. . . .

That was what was terrible, because Florence forced Leonora
herself to  abandon her high reserve--Florence and the situation. It
appears that  Florence was in two minds whether to confess to me
or to Leonora. Confess  she had to. And she pitched at last on
Leonora, because if it had been me  she would have had to confess
a great deal more. Or, at least, I might have  guessed a great deal
more, about her "heart", and about Jimmy. So she went  to Leonora
one day and began hinting and hinting. And she enraged Leonora
to  such an extent that at last Leonora said:

"You want to tell me that you are Edward's mistress. You can be. I
have no  use for him."  That was really a calamity for Leonora,
because, once started, there was no  stopping the talking. She tried
to stop--but it was not to be done. She  found it necessary to send
Edward messages through Florence; for she would  not speak to
him. She had to give him, for instance, to understand that if I  ever
came to know of his intrigue she would ruin him beyond repair.
And it  complicated matters a good deal that Edward, at about this
time, was really  a little in love with her. He thought that he had
treated her so badly; that  she was so fine. She was so mournful
that he longed to comfort her, and he  thought himself such a
blackguard that there was nothing he would not have  done to
make amends. And Florence communicated these items of
information to  Leonora.

I don't in the least blame Leonora for her coarseness to Florence; it
must  have done Florence a world of good. But I do blame her for
giving way to  what was in the end a desire for
communicativeness. You see that business  cut her off from her
Church. She did not want to confess what she was doing  because
she was afraid that her spiritual advisers would blame her for 
deceiving me. I rather imagine that she would have preferred
damnation to  breaking my heart. That is what it works out at. She
need not have troubled. 

But, having no priests to talk to, she had to talk to someone, and as 
Florence insisted on talking to her, she talked back, in short,
explosive  sentences, like one of the damned. Precisely like one of
the damned. Well,  if a pretty period in hell on this earth can spare
her any period of pain in  Eternity--where there are not any
periods--I guess Leonora will escape hell  fire.

Her conversations with Florence would be like this. Florence
would happen in  on her, whilst she was doing her wonderful hair,
with a proposition from  Edward, who seems about that time to
have conceived the nave idea that he  might become a
polygamist. I daresay it was Florence who put it into his  head.
Anyhow, I am not responsible for the oddities of the human
psychology.  But it certainly appears that at about that date Edward
cared more for  Leonora than he had ever done before--or, at any
rate, for a long time. And,  if Leonora had been a person to play
cards and if she had played her cards  well, and if she had had no
sense of shame and so on, she might then have  shared Edward
with Florence until the time came for jerking that poor cuckoo  out
of the nest.  Well, Florence would come to Leonora with some
such proposition. I do not  mean to say that she put it baldly, like
that. She stood out that she was  not Edward's mistress until
Leonora said that she had seen Edward coming out  of her room at
an advanced hour of the night. That checked Florence a bit;  but
she fell back upon her "heart" and stuck out that she had merely
been  conversing with Edward in order to bring him to a better
frame of mind.  Florence had, of course, to stick to that story; for
even Florence would not  have had the face to implore Leonora to
grant her favours to Edward if she  had admitted that she was
Edward's mistress. That could not be done. At the  same time
Florence had such a pressing desire to talk about something. There 
would have been nothing else to talk about but a rapprochement
between that  estranged pair. So Florence would go on babbling
and Leonora would go on  brushing her hair. And then Leonora
would say suddenly something like:

"I should think myself defiled if Edward touched me now that he
has touched  you."

That would discourage Florence a bit; but after a week or so, on
another  morning she would have another try.

And even in other things Leonora deteriorated. She had promised
Edward to  leave the spending of his own income in his own
hands. And she had fully  meant to do that. I daresay she would
have done it too; though, no doubt,  she would have spied upon his
banking account in secret. She was not a Roman  Catholic for
nothing. But she took so serious a view of Edward's  unfaithfulness
to the memory of poor little Maisie that she could not trust  him
any more at all .

So when she got back to Branshaw she started, after less than a
month, to  worry him about the minutest items of his expenditure.
She allowed him to  draw his own cheques, but there was hardly a
cheque that she did not  scrutinize--except for a private account of
about five hundred a year which,  tacitly, she allowed him to keep
for expenditure on his mistress or  mistresses. He had to have his
jaunts to Paris; he had to send expensive  cables in cipher to
Florence about twice a week. But she worried him about  his
expenditure on wines, on fruit trees, on harness, on gates, on the 
account at his blacksmith's for work done to a new patent Army
stirrup that  he was trying to invent. She could not see why he
should bother to invent a  new Army stirrup, and she was really
enraged when, after the invention was  mature, he made a present
to the War Office of the designs and the patent  rights. It was a
remarkably good stirrup.

I have told you, I think, that Edward spent a great deal of time, and
about  two hundred pounds for law fees on getting a poor girl, the
daughter of one  of his gardeners, acquitted of a charge of
murdering her baby. That was  positively the last act of Edward's
life. It came at a time when Nancy  Rufford was on her way to
India; when the most horrible gloom was over the  household;
when Edward himself was in an agony and behaving as prettily as 
he knew how. Yet even then Leonora made him a terrible scene
about this  expenditure of time and trouble. She sort of had the
vague idea that what  had passed with the girl and the rest of it
ought to have taught Edward a  lesson--the lesson of economy. She
threatened to take his banking account  away from him again. I
guess that made him cut his throat. He might have  stuck it out
otherwise--but the thought that he had lost Nancy and that, in 
addition, there was nothing left for him but a dreary, dreary
succession of  days in which he could be of no public service . . .
Well, it finished him.

It was during those years that Leonora tried to get up a love affair
of her  own with a fellow called Bayham--a decent sort of fellow.
A really nice man.  But the affair was no sort of success. I have
told you about it already. . .  .

II 

WELL, that about brings me up to the date of my receiving, in
Waterbury, the  laconic cable from Edward to the effect that he
wanted me to go to Branshaw  and have a chat. I was pretty busy at
the time and I was half minded to send  him a reply cable to the
effect that I would start in a fortnight. But I was  having a long
interview with old Mr Hurlbird's attorneys and immediately 
afterwards I had to have a long interview with the Misses Hurlbird,
so I  delayed cabling.

I had expected to find the Misses Hurlbird excessively old--in the
nineties  or thereabouts. The time had passed so slowly that I had
the impression that  it must have been thirty years since I had been
in the United States. It was  only twelve years. Actually Miss
Hurlbird was just sixty-one and Miss  Florence Hurlbird fifty-nine,
and they were both, mentally and physically,  as vigorous as could
be desired. They were, indeed, more vigorous, mentally,  than
suited my purpose, which was to get away from the United States
as  quickly as I could. The Hurlbirds were an exceedingly united 
family--exceedingly united except on one set of points. Each of the
three of  them had a separate doctor, whom they trusted
implicitly--and each had a  separate attorney. And each of them
distrusted the other's doctor and the  other's attorney. And,
naturally, the doctors and the attorneys warned one  all the
time--against each other. You cannot imagine how complicated it
all  became for me. Of course I had an attorney of my
own--recommended to me by  young Carter, my Philadelphia
nephew.

I do not mean to say that there was any unpleasantness of a
grasping kind.  The problem was quite another one--a moral
dilemma. You see, old Mr Hurlbird  had left all his property to
Florence with the mere request that she would  have erected to him
in the city of Waterbury, Ill., a memorial that should  take the form
of some sort of institution for the relief of sufferers from  the heart.
Florence's money had all come to me-- and with it old Mr 
Hurlbird's. He had died just five days before Florence.

Well, I was quite ready to spend a round million dollars on the
relief of  sufferers from the heart. The old gentleman had left
about a million and a  half; Florence had been worth about eight
hundred thousand--and as I figured  it out, I should cut up at about
a million myself. Anyhow, there was ample  money. But I
naturally wanted to consult the wishes of his surviving  relatives
and then the trouble really began. You see, it had been discovered 
that Mr Hurlbird had had nothing whatever the matter with his
heart. His  lungs had been a little affected all through his life and
he had died of  bronchitis. It struck Miss Florence Hurlbird that,
since her brother had  died of lungs and not of heart, his money
ought to go to lung patients.  That, she considered, was what her
brother would have wished. On the other  hand, by a kink, that I
could not at the time understand, Miss Hurlbird  insisted that I
ought to keep the money all to myself. She said that she did  not
wish for any monuments to the Hurlbird family. At the time I
thought  that that was because of a New England dislike for
necrological ostentation.  But I can figure out now, when I
remember certain insistent and continued  questions that she put to
me, about Edward Ashburnham, that there was  another idea in her
mind. And Leonora has told me that, on Florence's  dressing-table,
beside her dead body, there had lain a letter to Miss  Hurlbird--a
letter which Leonora posted without telling me. I don't know how 
Florence had time to write to her aunt; but I can quite understand
that she  would not like to go out of the world without making
some comments. So I  guess Florence had told Miss Hurlbird a
good bit about Edward Ashburnham in  a few scrawled words--and
that that was why the old lady did not wish the  name of Hurlbird
perpetuated. Perhaps also she thought that I had earned the 
Hurlbird money. It meant a pretty tidy lot of discussing, what with
the  doctors warning each other about the bad effects of
discussions on the  health of the old ladies, and warning me
covertly against each other, and  saying that old Mr Hurlbird might
have died of heart, after all, in spite of  the diagnosis of his doctor.
And the solicitors all had separate methods of  arranging about
how the money should be invested and entrusted and bound. 
Personally, I wanted to invest the money so that the interest could
be used  for the relief of sufferers from the heart. If old Mr
Hurlbird had not died  of any defects in that organ he had
considered that it was defective.  Moreover, Florence had certainly
died of her heart, as I saw it. And when  Miss Florence Hurlbird
stood out that the money ought to go to chest  sufferers I was
brought to thinking that there ought to be a chest  institution too,
and I advanced the sum that I was ready to provide to a  million
and a half of dollars. That would have given seven hundred and
fifty  thousand to each class of invalid. I did not want money at all
badly. All I  wanted it for was to be able to give Nancy Rufford a
good time. I did not  know much about housekeeping expenses in
England where, I presumed, she  would wish to live. I knew that
her needs at that time were limited to good  chocolates, and a good
horse or two, and simple, pretty frocks. Probably she  would want
more than that later on. But even if I gave a million and a half 
dollars to these institutions I should still have the equivalent of
about  twenty thousand a year English, and I considered that Nancy
could have a  pretty good time on that or less. Anyhow, we had a
stiff set of arguments up  at the Hurlbird mansion which stands on
a bluff over the town. It may strike  you, silent listener, as being
funny if you happen to be European. But moral  problems of that
description and the giving of millions to institutions are 
immensely serious matters in my country. Indeed, they are the
staple topics  for consideration amongst the wealthy classes. We
haven't got peerage and  social climbing to occupy us much, and
decent people do not take interest in  politics or elderly people in
sport. So that there were real tears shed by  both Miss Hurlbird and
Miss Florence before I left that city. I left it  quite abruptly. Four
hours after Edward's telegram came another from  Leonora, saying:
"Yes, do come. You could be so helpful." I simply told my 
attorney that there was the million and a half; that he could invest
it as  he liked, and that the purposes must be decided by the Misses
Hurlbird. I  was, anyhow, pretty well worn out by all the
discussions. And, as I have  never heard yet from the Misses
Hurlbird, I rather think that Miss Hurlbird,  either by revelations or
by moral force, has persuaded Miss Florence that no  memorial to
their names shall be erected in the city of Waterbury, Conn.  Miss
Hurlbird wept dreadfully when she heard that I was going to stay
with  the Ashburnhams, but she did not make any comments. I was
aware, at that  date, that her niece had been seduced by that fellow
Jimmy before I had  married her--but I contrived to produce on her
the impression that I thought  Florence had been a model wife.
Why, at that date I still believed that  Florence had been perfectly
virtuous after her marriage to me. I had not  figured it out that she
could have played it so low down as to continue her  intrigue with
that fellow under my roof. Well, I was a fool. But I did not  think
much about Florence at that date. My mind was occupied with
what was  happening at Branshaw. I had got it into my head that
the telegrams had  something to do with Nancy. It struck me that
she might have shown signs of  forming an attachment for some
undesirable fellow and that Leonora wanted me  to come back and
marry her out of harm's way. That was what was pretty  firmly in
my mind. And it remained in my mind for nearly ten days after my 
arrival at that beautiful old place. Neither Edward nor Leonora
made any  motion to talk to me about anything other than the
weather and the crops.  Yet, although there were several young
fellows about, I could not see that  any one in particular was
distinguished by the girl's preference. She  certainly appeared illish
and nervous, except when she woke up to talk gay  nonsense to
me. Oh, the pretty thing that she was. . . .

I imagined that what must have happened was that the undesirable
young man  had been forbidden the place and that Nancy was
fretting a little.  What had happened was just Hell. Leonora had
spoken to Nancy; Nancy had  spoken to Edward; Edward had
spoken to Leonora--and they had talked and  talked. And talked.
You have to imagine horrible pictures of gloom and half  lights,
and emotions running through silent nights--through whole nights. 
You have to imagine my beautiful Nancy appearing suddenly to
Edward, rising  up at the foot of his bed, with her long hair falling,
like a split cone of  shadow, in the glimmer of a night-light that
burned beside him. You have to  imagine her, a silent, a no doubt
agonized figure, like a spectre, suddenly  offering herself to
him--to save his reason! And you have to imagine his  frantic
refusal--and talk. And talk! My God!

And yet, to me, living in the house, enveloped with the charm of
the quiet  and ordered living, with the silent, skilled servants
whose mere laying out  of my dress clothes was like a caress--to
me who was hourly with them they  appeared like tender, ordered
and devoted people, smiling, absenting  themselves at the proper
intervals; driving me to meets--just good people!  How the
devil--how the devil do they do it?

At dinner one evening Leonora said--she had just opened a
telegram:

"Nancy will be going to India, tomorrow, to be with her father."

No one spoke. Nancy looked at her plate; Edward went on eating
his pheasant.  I felt very bad; I imagined that it would be up to me
to propose to Nancy  that evening. It appeared to me to be queer
that they had not given me any  warning of Nancy's departure--But
I thought that that was only English  manners--some sort of
delicacy that I had not got the hang of. You must  remember that at
that moment I trusted in Edward and Leonora and in Nancy 
Rufford, and in the tranquility of ancient haunts of peace, as I had
trusted  in my mother's love. And that evening Edward spoke to
me.

 What in the interval had happened had been this:

Upon her return from Nauheim Leonora had completely broken
down--because she  knew she could trust Edward. That seems odd
but, if you know anything about  breakdowns, you will know that
by the ingenious torments that fate prepares  for us, these things
come as soon as, a strain having relaxed, there is  nothing more to
be done. It is after a husband's long illness and death that  a widow
goes to pieces; it is at the end of a long rowing contest that a  crew
collapses and lies forward upon its oars. And that was what
happened to  Leonora.

From certain tones in Edward's voice; from the long, steady stare
that he  had given her from his bloodshot eyes on rising from the
dinner table in the  Nauheim hotel, she knew that, in the affair of
the poor girl, this was a  case in which Edward's moral scruples, or
his social code, or his idea that  it would be playing it too low
down, rendered Nancy perfectly safe. The  girl, she felt sure, was
in no danger at all from Edward. And in that she  was perfectly
right. The smash was to come from herself.

She relaxed; she broke; she drifted, at first quickly, then with an 
increasing momentum, down the stream of destiny. You may put it
that, having  been cut off from the restraints of her religion, for the
first time in her  life, she acted along the lines of her instinctive
desires. I do not know  whether to think that, in that she was no
longer herself; or that, having  let loose the bonds of her standards,
her conventions and her traditions,  she was being, for the first
time, her own natural self. She was torn  between her intense,
maternal love for the girl and an intense jealousy of  the woman
who realizes that the man she loves has met what appears to be the 
final passion of his life. She was divided between an intense
disgust for  Edward's weakness in conceiving this passion, an
intense pity for the  miseries that he was enduring, and a feeling
equally intense, but one that  she hid from herself--a feeling of
respect for Edward's determination to  keep himself, in this
particular affair, unspotted.

And the human heart is a very mysterious thing. It is impossible to
say that  Leonora, in acting as she then did, was not filled with a
sort of hatred of  Edward's final virtue. She wanted, I think, to
despise him. He was, she  realized gone from her for good. Then
let him suffer, let him agonize; let  him, if possible, break and go
to that Hell that is the abode of broken  resolves. She might have
taken a different line. It would have been so easy  to send the girl
away to stay with some friends; to have taken her away  herself
upon some pretext or other. That would not have cured things but
it  would have been the decent line, . . . But, at that date, poor
Leonora was  incapable of taking any line whatever.

She pitied Edward frightfully at one time--and then she acted
along the  lines of pity; she loathed him at another and then she
acted as her loathing  dictated. She gasped, as a person dying of
tuberculosis gasps for air. She  craved madly for communication
with some other human soul. And the human  soul that she
selected was that of the girl.

Perhaps Nancy was the only person that she could have talked to.
With her  necessity for reticences, with her coldness of manner,
Leonora had  singularly few intimates. She had none at all, with
the exception of the Mrs  Colonel Whelen, who had advised her
about the affair with La Dolciquita, and  the one or two religious,
who had guided her through life. The Colonel's  wife was at that
time in Madeira; the religious she now avoided. Her  visitors' book
had seven hundred names in it; there was not a soul that she  could
speak to. She was Mrs Ashburnham of Branshaw Teleragh.

She was the great Mrs Ashburnham of Branshaw and she lay all
day upon her  bed in her marvellous, light, airy bedroom with the
chintzes and the  Chippendale and the portraits of deceased
Ashburnhams by Zoffany and  Zucchero. When there was a meet
she would struggle up--supposing it were  within driving
distance--and let Edward drive her and the girl to the  cross-roads
or the country house. She would drive herself back alone; Edward 
would ride off with the girl. Ride Leonora could not, that
season--her head  was too bad. Each pace of her mare was an
anguish.

But she drove with efficiency and precision; she smiled at the
Gimmers and  Ffoulkes and the Hedley Seatons. She threw with
exactitude pennies to the  boys who opened gates for her; she sat
upright on the seat of the high  dog-cart; she waved her hands to
Edward and Nancy as they rode off with the  hounds, and every
one could hear her clear, high voice, in the chilly  weather, saying: 
"Have a good time!"

Poor forlorn woman! . . .

There was, however, one spark of consolation. It came from the
fact that  Rodney Bayham, of Bayham, followed her always with
his eyes. It had been  three years since she had tried her abortive
love-affair with him. Yet  still, on the winter mornings he would
ride up to her shafts and just say:  "Good day," and look at her with
eyes that were not imploring, but seemed to  say: "You see, I am
still, as the Germans say, A. D.--at disposition."

It was a great consolation, not because she proposed ever to take
him up  again, but because it showed her that there was in the
world one faithful  soul in riding-breeches. And it showed her that
she was not losing her  looks.

And, indeed, she was not losing her looks. She was forty, but she
was as  clean run as on the day she had left the convent--as clear in
outline, as  clear coloured in the hair, as dark blue in the eyes. She
thought that her  looking-glass told her this; but there are always
the doubts. . . . Rodney  Bayham's eyes took them away.

It is very singular that Leonora should not have aged at all. I
suppose that  there are some types of beauty and even of youth
made for the embellishments  that come with enduring sorrow.
That is too elaborately put. I mean that  Leonora, if everything had
prospered, might have become too hard and, maybe,  overbearing.
As it was she was tuned down to appearing efficient--and yet 
sympathetic. That is the rarest of all blends. And yet I swear that
Leonora,  in her restrained way, gave the impression of being
intensely sympathetic.  When she listened to you she appeared also
to be listening to some sound  that was going on in the distance.
But still, she listened to you and took  in what you said, which,
since the record of humanity is a record of  sorrows, was, as a rule,
something sad.

I think that she must have taken Nancy through many terrors of the
night and  many bad places of the day. And that would account for
the girl's passionate  love for the elder woman. For Nancy's love
for Leonora was an admiration  that is awakened in Catholics by
their feeling for the Virgin Mary and for  various of the saints. It is
too little to say that the girl would have laid  her life at Leonora's
feet. Well, she laid there the offer of her  virtue--and her reason.
Those were sufficient instalments of her life. It  would today be
much better for Nancy Rufford if she were dead.

Perhaps all these reflections are a nuisance; but they crowd on me.
I will  try to tell the story.

You see--when she came back from Nauheim Leonora began to
have her  headaches--headaches lasting through whole days, during
which she could  speak no word and could bear to hear no sound.
And, day after day, Nancy  would sit with her, silent and
motionless for hours, steeping handkerchiefs  in vinegar and water,
and thinking her own thoughts. It must have been very  bad for
her--and her meals alone with Edward must have been bad for her 
too--and beastly bad for Edward. Edward, of course, wavered in
his  demeanour, What else could he do? At times he would sit
silent and dejected  over his untouched food. He would utter
nothing but monosyllables when Nancy  spoke to him. Then he
was simply afraid of the girl falling in love with  him. At other
times he would take a little wine; pull himself together;  attempt to
chaff Nancy about a stake and binder hedge that her mare had 
checked at, or talk about the habits of the Chitralis. That was when
he was  thinking that it was rough on the poor girl that he should
have become a  dull companion. He realized that his talking to her
in the park at Nauheim  had done her no harm.

But all that was doing a great deal of harm to Nancy. It gradually
opened  her eyes to the fact that Edward was a man with his ups
and downs and not an  invariably gay uncle like a nice dog, a
trustworthy horse or a girl friend.  She would find him in attitudes
of frightful dejection, sunk into his  armchair in the study that was
half a gun-room. She would notice through the  open door that his
face was the face of an old, dead man, when he had no one  to talk
to. Gradually it forced itself upon her attention that there were 
profound differences between the pair that she regarded a her
uncle and her  aunt. It was a conviction that came very slowly.

It began with Edward's giving an oldish horse to a young fellow
called  Selmes. Selmes' father had been ruined by fraudulent
solicitor and the  Selmes family had had to sell their hunters. It
was a case that had excited  a good deal of sympathy in that part of
the county. And Edward, meeting the  young man one day,
unmounted, and seeing him to be very unhappy, had offered  to
give him an old Irish cob upon which he was riding. It was a silly
sort  of thing to do really. The horse was worth from thirty to forty
pounds and  Edward might have known that the gift would upset
his wife. But Edward just  had to comfort that unhappy young man
whose father he had known all his  life. And what made it all the
worse was that young Selmes could not afford  to keep the horse
even. Edward recollected this, immediately after he had  made the
offer, and said quickly:

"Of course I mean that you should stable the horse at Branshaw
until you  have time to turn round or want to sell him and get a
better."

Nancy went straight home and told all this to Leonora who was
lying down.  She regarded it as a splendid instance of Edward's
quick consideration for  the feelings and the circumstances of the
distressed. She thought it would  cheer Leonora up--because it
ought to cheer any woman up to know that she  had such a
splendid husband. That was the last girlish thought she ever had. 
For Leonora, whose headache had left her collected but miserably
weak,  turned upon her bed and uttered words that were amazing
to the girl:

"I wish to God," she said, "that he was your husband, and not mine.
We shall  be ruined. We shall be ruined. Am I never to have a
chance?" And suddenly  Leonora burst into a passion of tears. She
pushed herself up from the  pillows with one elbow and sat
there--crying, crying, crying, with her face  hidden in her hands
and the tears falling through her fingers.

The girl flushed, stammered and whimpered as if she had been
personally  insulted.

"But if Uncle Edward . . ." she began.

"That man," said Leonora, with an extraordinary bitterness, "would
give the  shirt off his back and off mine--and off yours to any . . ."
She could not  finish the sentence.

At that moment she had been feeling an extraordinary hatred and
contempt for  her husband. All the morning and all the afternoon
she had been lying there  thinking that Edward and the girl were
together--in the field and hacking it  home at dusk. She had been
digging her sharp nails into her palms.

The house had been very silent in the drooping winter weather.
And then,  after an eternity of torture, there had invaded it the
sound of opening  doors, of the girl's gay voice saying:

"Well, it was only under the mistletoe." . . . And there was
Edward's gruff  undertone. Then Nancy had come in, with feet that
had hastened up the stairs  and that tiptoed as they approached the
open door of Leonora's room.  Branshaw had a great big hall with
oak floors and tiger skins. Round this  hall there ran a gallery upon
which Leonora's doorway gave. And even when  she had the worst
of her headaches she liked to have her door open--I  suppose so
that she might hear the approaching footsteps of ruin and  disaster.
At any rate she hated to be in a room with a shut door.

At that moment Leonora hated Edward with a hatred that was like
hell, and  she would have liked to bring her riding-whip down
across the girl's face.  What right had Nancy to be young and
slender and dark, and gay at times, at  times mournful? What right
had she to be exactly the woman to make Leonora's  husband
happy? For Leonora knew that Nancy would have made Edward
happy.

Yes, Leonora wished to bring her riding-whip down on Nancy's
young face. She  imagined the pleasure she would feel when the
lash fell across those queer  features; the plea sure she would feel
at drawing the handle at the same  moment toward her, so as to cut
deep into the flesh and to leave a lasting  wheal.

Well, she left a lasting wheal, and her words cut deeply into the
girl's  mind. . . .

They neither of them spoke about that again. A fortnight went
by--a  fortnight of deep rains, of heavy fields, of bad scent.
Leonora's headaches  seemed to have gone for good. She hunted
once or twice, letting herself be  piloted by Bayham, whilst
Edward looked after the girl. Then, one evening,  when those three
were dining alone, Edward said, in the queer, deliberate,  heavy
tones that came out of him in those days (he was looking at the 
table):

"I have been thinking that Nancy ought to do more for her father.
He is  getting an old man. I have written to Colonel Rufford,
suggesting that she  should go to him."

Leonora called out:

"How dare you? How dare you?"

The girl put her hand over her heart and cried out: "Oh, my sweet
Saviour,  help mel" That was the queer way she thought within her
mind, and the words  forced themselves to her lips. Edward said
nothing. 

And that night, by a merciless trick of the devil that pays attention
to  this sweltering hell of ours, Nancy Rufford had a letter from her
mother. It  came whilst Leonora was talking to Edward, or Leonora
would have intercepted  it as she had intercepted others. It was an
amazing and a horrible letter. .  . .

I don't know what it contained. I just average out from its effects
on Nancy  that her mother, having eloped with some worthless sort
of fellow, had done  what is called "sinking lower and lower".
Whether she was actually on the  streets I do not know, but I rather
think that she eked out a small  allowance that she had from her
husband by that means of livelihood. And I  think that she stated as
much in her letter to Nancy and upbraided the girl  with living in
luxury whilst her mother starved. And it must have been  horrible
in tone, for Mrs Rufford was a cruel sort of woman at the best of 
times. It must have seemed to that poor girl, opening her letter, for 
distraction from another grief, up in her bedroom, like the laughter
of a  devil.

I just cannot bear to think of my poor dear girl at that moment. . . .

And, at the same time, Leonora was lashing, like a cold fiend, into
the  unfortunate Edward. Or, perhaps, he was not so unfortunate;
because he had  done what he knew to be the right thing, he may
be deemed happy. I leave it  to you. At any rate, he was sitting in
his deep chair, and Leonora came into  his room--for the first time
in nine years. She said:

"This is the most atrocious thing you have done in your atrocious
life." He  never moved and he never looked at her. God knows
what was in Leonora's mind  exactly.

I like to think that, uppermost in it was concern and horror at the
thought  of the poor girl's going back to a father whose voice made
her shriek in the  night. And, indeed, that motive was very strong
with Leonora. But I think  there was also present the thought that
she wanted to go on torturing Edward  with the girl's presence. She
was, at that time, capable of that.

Edward was sunk in his chair; there were in the room two candles,
hidden by  green glass shades. The green shades were reflected in
the glasses of the  book-cases that contained not books but guns
with gleaming brown barrels and  fishing-rods in green baize
over-covers. There was dimly to be seen, above a  mantelpiece
encumbered with spurs, hooves and bronze models of horses, a 
dark-brown picture of a white horse.

"If you think," Leonora said, "that I do not know that you are in
love with  the girl . . ." She began spiritedly, but she could not find
any ending for  the sentence. Edward did not stir; he never spoke.
And then Leonora said:

"If you want me to divorce you, I will. You can marry her then.
She's in  love with you."

He groaned at that, a little, Leonora said. Then she went away.

Heaven knows what happened in Leonora after that. She certainly
does not  herself know. She probably said a good deal more to
Edward than I have been  able to report; but that is all that she has
told me and I am not going to  make up speeches. To follow her
psychological development of that moment I  think we must allow
that she upbraided him for a great deal of their past  life, whilst
Edward sat absolutely silent. And, indeed, in speaking of it 
afterwards, she has said several times: "I said a great deal more to
him  than I wanted to, just because he was so silent." She talked, in
fact, in  the endeavour to sting him into speech.

She must have said so much that, with the expression of her
grievance, her  mood changed. She went back to her own room in
the gallery, and sat there  for a long time thinking. And she thought
herself into a mood of absolute  unselfishness, of absolute
self-contempt, too. She said to herself that she  was no good; that
she had failed in all her efforts--in her efforts to get  Edward back
as in her efforts to make him curb his expenditure. She imagined 
herself to be exhausted; she imagined herself to be done. Then a
great fear  came over her.

She thought that Edward, after what she had said to him, must
have committed  suicide. She went out on to the gallery and
listened; there was no sound in  all the house except the regular
beat of the great clock in the hall. But,  even in her debased
condition, she was not the person to hang about. She  acted. She
went straight to Edward's room, opened the door, and looked in.

He was oiling the breech action of a gun. It was an unusual thing
for him to  do, at that time of night, in his evening clothes. It never
occurred to her,  nevertheless, that he was going to shoot himself
with that implement. She  knew that he was doing it just for
occupation--to keep himself from  thinking. He looked up when
she opened the door, his face illuminated by the  light cast
upwards from the round orifices in the green candle shades.

She said:

"I didn't imagine that I should find Nancy here." She thought that
she owed  that to him. He answered then:

"I don't imagine that you did imagine it." Those were the only
words he  spoke that night. She went, like a lame duck, back
through the long  corridors; she stumbled over the familiar tiger
skins in the dark hall. She  could hardly drag one limb after the
other. In the gallery she perceived  that Nancy's door was half open
and that there was a light in the girl's  room. A sudden madness
possessed her, a desire for action, a thirst for  self-explanation.

Their rooms all gave on to the gallery; Leonora's to the east, the
girl's  next, then Edward's. The sight of those three open doors,
side by side,  gaping to receive whom the chances of the black
night might bring, made  Leonora shudder all over her body. She
went into Nancy's room.

The girl was sitting perfectly still in an armchair, very upright, as
she  had been taught to sit at the convent. She appeared to be as
calm as a  church; her hair fell, black and like a pall, down over
both her shoulders.  The fire beside her was burning brightly; she
must have just put coals on.  She was in a white silk kimono that
covered her to the feet. The clothes  that she had taken off were
exactly folded upon the proper seats. Her long  hands were one
upon each arm of the chair that had a pink and white chintz  back.

Leonora told me these things. She seemed to think it extraordinary
that the  girl could have done such orderly things as fold up the
clothes she had  taken off upon such a night--when Edward had
announced that he was going to  send her to her father, and when,
from her mother, she had received that  letter. The letter, in its
envelope, was in her right hand.

Leonora did not at first perceive it. She said:

"What are you doing so late?"

The girl answered: "Just thinking."

They seemed to think in whispers and to speak below their breaths.
Then  Leonora's eyes fell on the envelope, and she recognized Mrs
Rufford's  handwriting.

It was one of those moments when thinking was impossible,
Leonora said. It  was as if stones were being thrown at her from
every direction and she could  only run. She heard herself exclaim: 
"Edward's dying--because of you. He's dying. He's worth more than
either of  us. . . ."

The girl looked past her at the panels of the half-closed door.

"My poor father," she said, "my poor father."  "You must stay
here," Leonora answered fiercely. "You must stay here. I tell  you
you must stay here."

"I am going to Glasgow," Nancy answered. "I shall go to Glasgow
tomorrow  morning. My mother is in Glasgow."

It appears that it was in Glasgow that Mrs Rufford pursued her
disorderly  life. She had selected that city, not because it was more
profitable but  because it was the natal home of her husband to
whom she desired to cause as  much pain as possible.

"You must stay here," Leonora began, "to save Edward. He's dying
for love of  you."

The girl turned her calm eyes upon Leonora.  "I know it," she said.
"And I am dying for love of him."

Leonora uttered an "Ah," that, in spite of herself, was an "Ah" of
horror  and of grief.

"That is why," the girl continued, "I am going to Glasgow--to take
my mother  away from there." She added, "To the ends of the
earth," for, if the last  months had made her nature that of a
woman, her phrases were still  romantically those of a schoolgirl.
It was as if she had grown up so quickly  that there had not been
time to put her hair up. But she added: "We're no  good--my
mother and I."

Leonora said, with her fierce calmness:

"No. No. You're not no good. It's I that am no good. You can't let
that man  go on to ruin for want of you. You must belong to him."

The girl, she said, smiled at her with a queer, far-away smile--as if
she  were a thousand years old, as if Leonora were a tiny child.

"I knew you would come to that,' she said, very slowly. "But we
are not  worth it--Edward and I."

III 

NANCY had, in fact, been thinking ever since Leonora had made
that comment  over the giving of the horse to young Selmes. She
had been thinking and  thinking, because she had had to sit for
many days silent beside her aunt's  bed. (She had always thought of
Leonora as her aunt.) And she had had to sit  thinking during many
silent meals with Edward. And then, at times, with his  bloodshot
eyes and creased, heavy mouth, he would smile at her. And 
gradually the knowledge had come to her that Edward did not love
Leonora and  that Leonora hated Edward. Several things
contributed to form and to harden  this conviction.  She was
allowed to read the papers in those days--or, rather, since Leonora 
was always on her bed and Edward breakfasted alone and went out
early, over  the estate, she was left alone with the papers. One day,
in the papers, she  saw the portrait of a woman she knew very well.
Beneath it she read the  words: "The Hon. Mrs Brand, plaintiff in
the remarkable divorce case  reported on p. 8." Nancy hardly knew
what a divorce case was. She had been  so remarkably well
brought up, and Roman Catholics do not practise divorce.  I don't
know how Leonora had done it exactly. I suppose she had always 
impressed it on Nancy's mind that nice women did not read these
things, and  that would have been enough to make Nancy skip
those pages.

She read, at any rate, the account of the Brand divorce
case--principally  because she wanted to tell Leonora about it. She
imagined that Leonora, when  her headache left her, would like to
know what was happening to Mrs Brand,  who lived at
Christchurch, and whom they both liked very well. The case 
occupied three days, and the report that Nancy first came upon was
that of  the third day. Edward, however, kept the papers of the
week, after his  methodical fashion, in a rack in his gun-room, and
when she had finished her  breakfast Nancy went to that quiet
apartment and had what she would have  called a good read. It
seemed to her to be a queer affair. She could not  understand why
one counsel should be so anxious to know all about the 
movements of Mr Brand upon a certain day; she could not
understand why a  chart of the bedroom accommodation at
Christchurch Old Hall should be  produced in court. She did not
even see why they should want to know that,  upon a certain
occasion, the drawing-room door was locked. It made her  laugh; it
appeared to be all so senseless that grown people should occupy 
themselves with such matters. It struck her, nevertheless, as odd
that one  of the counsel should cross-question Mr Brand so
insistently and so  impertinently as to his feelings for Miss Lupton.
Nancy knew Miss Lupton of  Ringwood very well--a jolly girl, who
rode a horse with two white fetlocks.  Mr Brand persisted that he
did not love Miss Lupton. . . . Well, of course  he did not love Miss
Lupton; he was a married man. You might as well think  of Uncle
Edward loving . . . loving anybody but Leonora. When people were 
married there was an end of loving. There were, no doubt, people
who  misbehaved--but they were poor people--or people not like
those she knew.  So these matters presented themselves to Nancy's
mind. But later on in the  case she found that Mr Brand had to
confess to a "guilty intimacy" with some  one or other. Nancy
imagined that he must have been telling some one his  wife's
secrets; she could not understand why that was a serious offence.
Of  course it was not very gentlemanly--it lessened her opinion of
Mrs Brand.  But since she found that Mrs Brand had condoned that
offence, she imagined  that they could not have been very serious
secrets that Mr Brand had told.  And then, suddenly, it was forced
on her conviction that Mr Brand--the mild  Mr Brand that she had
seen a month or two before their departure to Nauheim,  playing
"Blind Man's Buff" with his children and kissing his wife when he 
caught her--Mr Brand and Mrs Brand had been on the worst
possible terms.  That was incredible.

Yet there it was--in black and white. Mr Brand drank; Mr Brand
had struck  Mrs Brand to the ground when he was drunk. Mr Brand
was adjudged, in two or  three abrupt words, at the end of columns
and columns of paper, to have been  guilty of cruelty to his wife
and to have committed adultery with Miss  Lupton. The last words
conveyed nothing to Nancy--nothing real, that is to  say. She knew
that one was commanded not to commit adultery--but why, she 
thought, should one? It was probably something like catching
salmon out of  season--a thing one did not do. She gathered it had
something to do with  kissing, or holding some one in your arms. .
. .

And yet the whole effect of that reading upon Nancy was
mysterious,  terrifying and evil. She felt a sickness--a sickness that
grew as she read.  Her heart beat painfully; she began to cry. She
asked God how He could  permit such things to be. And she was
more certain that Edward did not love  Leonora and that Leonora
hated Edward. Perhaps, then, Edward loved some one  else. It was
unthinkable.

If he could love some one else than Leonora, her fierce unknown
heart  suddenly spoke in her side, why could it not be herself? And
he did not love  her. . . . This had occurred about a month before
she got the letter from  her mother. She let the matter rest until the
sick feeling went off; it did  that in a day or two. Then, finding that
Leonora's headaches had gone, she  suddenly told Leonora that
Mrs Brand had divorced her husband. She asked  what, exactly, it
all meant.

Leonora was lying on the sofa in the hall; she was feeling so weak
that she  could hardly find the words. She answered just:

"It means that Mr Brand will be able to marry again."

Nancy said:

"But . . . but . . ." and then: "He will be able to marry Miss Lupton." 
Leonora just moved a hand in assent. Her eyes were shut.

"Then . . ." Nancy began. Her blue eyes were full of horror: her
brows were  tight above them; the lines of pain about her mouth
were very distinct. In  her eyes the whole of that familiar, great
hall had a changed aspect. The  andirons with the brass flowers at
the ends appeared unreal; the burning  logs were just logs that
were burning and not the comfortable symbols of an  indestructible
mode of life. The flame fluttered before the high fireback;  the St
Bernard sighed in his sleep. Outside the winter rain fell and fell. 
And suddenly she thought that Edward might marry some one else;
and she  nearly screamed.

Leonora opened her eyes, lying sideways, with her face upon the
black and  gold pillow of the sofa that was drawn half across the
great fireplace.

"I thought," Nancy said, "I never imagined. . . . Aren't marriages 
sacraments? Aren't they indissoluble? I thought you were married .
. . and .  . ." She was sobbing. "I thought you were married or not
married as you are  alive or dead."  "That," Leonora said, "is the
law of the church. It is not the law of the  land. . . ."

"Oh yes," Nancy said, "the Brands are Protestants." She felt a
sudden  safeness descend upon her, and for an hour or so her mind
was at rest. It  seemed to her idiotic not to have remembered Henry 
VIII and the basis upon  which Protestantism rests. She almost
laughed at herself.

The long afternoon wore on; the flames still fluttered when the
maid made up  the fire; the St Bernard awoke and lolloped away
towards the kitchen. And  then Leonora opened her eyes and said
almost coldly:

"And you? Don't you think you will get married?"

It was so unlike Leonora that, for the moment, the girl was
frightened in  the dusk. But then, again, it seemed a perfectly
reasonable question.  "I don't know," she answered. "I don't know
that anyone wants to marry me."

"Several people want to marry you," Leonora said.

"But I don't want to marry," Nancy answered. "I should like to go
on living  with you and Edward. I don't think I am in the way or
that I am really an  expense. If I went you would have to have a
companion. Or, perhaps, I ought  to earn my living. . . ."

"I wasn't thinking of that," Leonora answered in the same dull tone.
"You  will have money enough from your father. But most people
want to be  married."

I believe that she then asked the girl if she would not like to marry
me,  and that Nancy answered that she would marry me if she were
told to; but  that she wanted to go on living there. She added:

"If I married anyone I should want him to be like Edward."

She was frightened out of her life. Leonora writhed on her couch
and called  out: "Oh, God! . . ."

Nancy ran for the maid; for tablets of aspirin; for wet
handkerchiefs. It  never occurred to her that Leonora's expression
of agony was for anything  else than physical pain.

You are to remember that all this happened a month before
Leonora went into  the girl's room at night. I have been casting
back again; but I cannot help  it. It is so difficult to keep all these
people going. I tell you about  Leonora and bring her up to date;
then about Edward, who has fallen behind.  And then the girl gets
hopelessly left behind. I wish I could put it down in  diary form.
Thus: On the 1st of September they returned from Nauheim. 
Leonora at once took to her bed. By the 1st of October they were
all going  to meets together. Nancy had already observed very fully
that Edward was  strange in his manner. About the 6th of that
month Edward gave the horse to  young Selmes, and Nancy had
cause to believe that her aunt did not love her  uncle. On the 20th
she read the account of the divorce case, which is  reported in the
papers of the 18th and the two following days. On the 23rd  she
had the conversation with her aunt in the hall--about marriage in 
general and about her own possible marriage, her aunt's coming to
her  bedroom did not occur until the 12th of November. . . .

Thus she had three weeks for introspection--for introspection
beneath gloomy  skies, in that old house, rendered darker by the
fact that it lay in a  hollow crowned by fir trees with their black
shadows. It was not a good  situation for a girl. She began thinking
about love, she who had never  before considered it as anything
other than a rather humorous, rather  nonsensical matter. She
remembered chance passages in chance books--things  that had not
really affected her at all at the time. She remembered  someone's
love for the Princess Badrulbadour; she remembered to have heard 
that love was a flame, a thirst, a withering up of the vitals--though
she  did not know what the vitals were. She had a vague
recollection that love  was said to render a hopeless lover's eyes
hopeless; she remembered a  character in a book who was said to
have taken to drink through love; she  remembered that lovers'
existences were said to be punctuated with heavy  sighs. Once she
went to the little cottage piano that was in the corner of  the hall
and began to play. It was a tinkly, reedy instrument, for none of 
that household had any turn for music. Nancy herself could play a
few simple  songs, and she found herself playing. She had been
sitting on the window  seat, looking out on the fading day. Leonora
had gone to pay some calls;  Edward was looking after some
planting up in the new spinney. Thus she found  herself playing on
the old piano. She did not know how she came to be doing  it. A
silly lilting wavering tune came from before her in the dusk--a tune 
in which major notes with their cheerful insistence wavered and
melted into  minor sounds, as, beneath a bridge, the high lights on
dark waters melt and  waver and disappear into black depths. Well,
it was a silly old tune. . . .

It goes with the words--they are about a willow tree, I think:  Thou
art to all lost loves the best The only true plant found.

--That sort of thing. It is Herrick, I believe, and the music with the 
reedy, irregular, lilting sound that goes with Herrick, And it was
dusk; the  heavy, hewn, dark pillars that supported the gallery were
like mourning  presences; the fire had sunk to nothing--a mere
glow amongst white ashes, .  . . It was a sentimental sort of place
and light and hour. . . .

And suddenly Nancy found that she was crying. She was crying
quietly; she  went on to cry with long convulsive sobs. It seemed to
her that everything  gay, everything charming, all light, all
sweetness, had gone out of life.  Unhappiness; unhappiness;
unhappiness was all around her. She seemed to know  no happy
being and she herself was agonizing. . . .

She remembered that Edward's eyes were hopeless; she was
certain that he was  drinking too much; at times he sighed deeply.
He appeared as a man who was  burning with inward flame; drying
up in the soul with thirst; withering up  in the vitals. Then, the
torturing conviction came to her--the conviction  that had visited
her again and again--that Edward must love some one other  than
Leonora. With her little, pedagogic sectarianism she remembered
that  Catholics do not do this thing. But Edward was a Protestant.
Then Edward  loved somebody. . . .

And, after that thought, her eyes grew hopeless; she sighed as the
old St  Bernard beside her did. At meals she would feel an
intolerable desire to  drink a glass of wine, and then another and
then a third. Then she would  find herself grow gay. . . . But in half
an hour the gaiety went; she felt  like a person who is burning up
with an inward flame; desiccating at the  soul with thirst;
withering up in the vitals. One evening she went into  Edward's
gun-room--he had gone to a meeting of the National Reserve 
Committee. On the table beside his chair was a decanter of
whisky. She  poured out a wineglassful and drank it off.  Flame
then really seemed to fill her body; her legs swelled; her face grew 
feverish. She dragged her tall height up to her room and lay in the
dark.  The bed reeled beneath her; she gave way to the thought that
she was in  Edward's arms; that he was kissing her on her face that
burned; on her  shoulders that burned, and on her neck that was on
fire.

She never touched alcohol again. Not once after that did she have
such  thoughts. They died out of her mind; they left only a feeling
of shame so  insupportable that her brain could not take it in and
they vanished. She  imagined that her anguish at the thought of
Edward's love for another person  was solely sympathy for
Leonora; she determined that the rest of her life  must be spent in
acting as Leonora's handmaiden--sweeping, tending, 
embroidering, like some Deborah, some medieval saint--I am not, 
unfortunately, up in the Catholic hagiology. But I know that she
pictured  herself as some personage with a depressed, earnest face
and tightly closed  lips, in a clear white room, watering flowers or
tending an embroidery  frame. Or, she desired to go with Edward
to Africa and to throw herself in  the path of a charging lion so that
Edward might be saved for Leonora at the  cost of her life. Well,
along with her sad thoughts she had her childish  ones.  She knew
nothing--nothing of life, except that one must live sadly. That she 
now knew. What happened to her on the night when she received
at once the  blow that Edward wished her to go to her father in
India and the blow of the  letter from her mother was this. She
called first upon her sweet  Saviour--and she thought of Our Lord
as her sweet Saviour!--that He might  make it impossible that she
should go to India. Then she realized from  Edward's demeanour
that he was determined that she should go to India. It  must then be
right that she should go. Edward was always right in his 
determinations. He was the Cid; he was Lohengrin; he was the
Chevalier  Bayard.

Nevertheless her mind mutinied and revolted. She could not leave
that house.  She imagined that he wished her gone that she might
not witness his amours  with another girl. Well, she was prepared
to tell him that she was ready to  witness his amours with another
young girl. She would stay there --to  comfort Leonora.

Then came the desperate shock of the letter from her mother. Her
mother  said, I believe, something like: "You have no right to go
on living your  life of prosperity and respect. You ought to be on
the streets with me. How  do you know that you are even Colonel
Rufford's daughter?" She did not know  what these words meant.
She thought of her mother as sleeping beneath the  arches whilst
the snow fell. That was the impression conveyed to her mind by 
the words "on the streets". A Platonic sense of duty gave her the
idea that  she ought to go to comfort her mother--the mother that
bore her, though she  hardly knew what the words meant. At the
same time she knew that her mother  had left her father with
another man--therefore she pitied her father, and  thought it
terrible in herself that she trembled at the sound of her  father's
voice. If her mother was that sort of woman it was natural that her 
father should have had accesses of madness in which he had struck
herself to  the ground. And the voice of her conscience said to her
that her first duty  was to her parents. It was in accord with this
awakened sense of duty that  she undressed with great care and
meticulously folded the clothes that she  took off. Sometimes, but
not very often, she threw them helter-skelter about  the room.

And that sense of duty was her prevailing mood when Leonora,
tall,  clean-run, golden-haired, all in black, appeared in her
doorway, and told  her that Edward was dying of love for her. She
knew then with her conscious  mind what she had known within
herself for months--that Edward was  dying--actually and
physically dying--of love for her. It seemed to her that  for one
short moment her spirit could say: "Domine, nunc dimittis, . . . 
Lord, now, lettest thou thy servant depart in peace." She imagined
that she  could cheerfully go away to Glasgow and rescue her
fallen mother.

IV 

AND it seemed to her to be in tune with the mood, with the hour,
and with  the woman in front of her to say that she knew Edward
was dying of love for  her and that she was dying of love for
Edward. For that fact had suddenly  slipped into place and become
real for her as the niched marker on a whist  tablet slips round with
the pressure of your thumb. That rubber at least was  made.

And suddenly Leonora seemed to have become different and she
seemed to have  become different in her attitude towards Leonora.
It was as if she, in her  frail, white, silken kimono, sat beside her
fire, but upon a throne. It was  as if Leonora, in her close dress of
black lace, with the gleaming white  shoulders and the coiled
yellow hair that the girl had always considered the  most beautiful
thing in the world--it was as if Leonora had become pinched, 
shrivelled, blue with cold, shivering, suppliant. Yet Leonora was
commanding  her. It was no good commanding her. She was going
on the morrow to her  mother who was in Glasgow.

Leonora went on saying that she must stay there to save Edward,
who was  dying of love for her. And, proud and happy in the
thought that Edward loved  her, and that she loved him, she did not
even listen to what Leonora said.  It appeared to her that it was
Leonora's business to save her husband's  body; she, Nancy,
possessed his soul--a precious thing that she would shield  and
bear away up in her arms--as if Leonora were a hungry dog, trying
to  spring up at a lamb that she was carrying. Yes, she felt as if
Edward's love  were a precious lamb that she were bearing away
from a cruel and predatory  beast. For, at that time, Leonora
appeared to her as a cruel and predatory  beast. Leonora, Leonora
with her hunger, with her cruelty had driven Edward  to madness.
He must be sheltered by his love for her and by her love--her  love
from a great distance and unspoken, enveloping him, surrounding
him,  upholding him; by her voice speaking from Glasgow, saying
that she loved,  that she adored, that she passed no moment
without longing, loving,  quivering at the thought of him.

Leonora said loudly, insistently, with a bitterly imperative tone:

"You must stay here; you must belong to Edward. I will divorce
him."

The girl answered:

"The Church does not allow of divorce. I cannot belong to your
husband. I am  going to Glasgow to rescue my mother."

The half-opened door opened noiselessly to the full. Edward was
there. His  devouring, doomed eyes were fixed on the girl's face;
his shoulders slouched  forward; he was undoubtedly half drunk
and he had the whisky decanter in one  hand, a slanting candlestick
in the other. He said, with a heavy ferocity,  to Nancy:

"I forbid you to talk about these things. You are to stay here until I
hear  from your father. Then you will go to your father."

The two women, looking at each other, like beasts about to spring,
hardly  gave a glance to him. He leaned against the door-post. He
said again:

"Nancy, I forbid you to talk about these things. I am the master of
this  house." And, at the sound of his voice, heavy, male, coming
from a deep  chest, in the night with the blackness behind him,
Nancy felt as if her  spirit bowed before him, with folded hands.
She felt that she would go to  India, and that she desired never
again to talk of these things.

Leonora said:

"You see that it is your duty to belong to him. He must not be
allowed to go  on drinking."

Nancy did not answer. Edward was gone; they heard him slipping
and shambling  on the polished oak of the stairs. Nancy screamed
when there came the sound  of a heavy fall. Leonora said again: 
"You see!"

The sounds went on from the hall below; the light of the candle
Edward held  flickered up between the hand rails of the gallery.
Then they heard his  voice:

"Give me Glasgow . . . Glasgow, in Scotland . . I want the number
of a man  called White, of Simrock Park, Glasgow . . . Edward
White, Simrock Park,  Glasgow . . . ten minutes . . . at this time of
night . . ." His voice was  quite level, normal, and patient. Alcohol
took him in the legs, not the  speech. "I can wait," his voice came
again. "Yes, I know they have a number.  I have been in
communication with them before."

"He is going to telephone to your mother," Leonora said. "He will
make it  all right for her." She got up and closed the door. She
came back to the  fire, and added bitterly: "He can always make it
all right for everybody,  except me--excepting me!"

The girl said nothing. She sat there in a blissful dream. She
seemed to see  her lover sitting as he always sat, in a round-backed
chair, in the dark  hall--sitting low, with the receiver at his ear,
talking in a gentle, slow  voice, that he reserved for the
telephone--and saving the world and her, in  the black darkness.
She moved her hand over the bareness of the base of her  throat, to
have the warmth of flesh upon it and upon her bosom.

She said nothing; Leonora went on talking. . . .

God knows what Leonora said. She repeated that the girl must
belong to her  husband. She said that she used that phrase because,
though she might have a  divorce, or even a dissolution of the
marriage by the Church, it would still  be adultery that the girl and
Edward would be committing. But she said that  that was
necessary; it was the price that the girl must pay for the sin of 
having made Edward love her, for the sin of loving her husband.
She talked  on and on, beside the fire. The girl must become an
adulteress; she had  wronged Edward by being so beautiful, so
gracious, so good. It was sinful to  be so good. She must pay the
price so as to save the man she had wronged.

In between her pauses the girl could hear the voice of Edward,
droning on,  indistinguishably, with jerky pauses for replies. It
made her glow with  pride; the man she loved was working for her.
He at least was resolved; was  malely determined; knew the right
thing. Leonora talked on with her eyes  boring into Nancy's. The
girl hardly looked at her and hardly heard her.  After a long time
Nancy said--after hours and hours:

"I shall go to India as soon as Edward hears from my father. I
cannot talk  about these things, because Edward does not wish it."

At that Leonora screamed out and wavered swiftly towards the
closed door.  And Nancy found that she was springing out of her
chair with her white arms  stretched wide. She was clasping the
other woman to her breast; she was  saying:

"Oh, my poor dear; oh, my poor dear." And they sat, crouching
together in  each other's arms, and crying and crying; and they lay
down in the same bed,  talking and talking, all through the night.
And all through the night Edward  could hear their voices through
the wall. That was how it went. . . .  Next morning they were all
three as if nothing had happened. Towards eleven  Edward came to
Nancy, who was arranging some Christmas roses in a silver  bowl.
He put a telegram beside her on the table. "You can uncode it for 
yourself," he said. Then, as he went out of the door, he said: "You
can tell  your aunt I have cabled to Mr Dowell to come over. He
will make things  easier till you leave." The telegram when it was
uncoded, read, as far as I  can remember: "Will take Mrs Rufford
to Italy. Undertake to do this for  certain. Am devotedly attached to
Mrs Rufford. Have no need of financial  assistance. Did not know
there was a daughter, and am much obliged to you  for pointing out
my duty.--White." It was something like that. Then the  household
resumed its wonted course of days until my arrival.

V IT is this part of the story that makes me saddest of all. For I ask
myself  unceasingly, my mind going round and round in a weary,
baffled space of  pain--what should these people have done? What,
in the name of God, should  they have done?

The end was perfectly plain to each of them--it was perfectly
manifest at  this stage that, if the girl did not, in Leonora's phrase,
"belong to  Edward," Edward must die, the girl must lose her
reason because Edward  died--and, that after a time, Leonora, who
was the coldest and the strongest  of the three, would console
herself by marrying Rodney Bayham and have a  quiet,
comfortable, good time. That end, on that night, whilst Leonora sat 
in the girl's bedroom and Edward telephoned down below--that
end was plainly  manifest. The girl, plainly, was half-mad already;
Edward was half dead;  only Leonora, active, persistent, instinct
with her cold passion of energy,  was "doing things". What then,
should they have done? worked out in the  extinction of two very
splendid personalities--for Edward and the girl were  splendid
personalities, in order that a third personality, more normal, 
should have, after a long period of trouble, a quiet, comfortable,
good  time.

I am writing this, now, I should say, a full eighteen months after
the words  that end my last chapter. Since writing the words "until
my arrival", which  I see end that paragraph, I have seen again for
a glimpse, from a swift  train, Beaucaire with the beautiful white
tower, Tarascon with the square  castle, the great Rhone, the
immense stretches of the Crau. I have rushed  through all
Provence--and all Provence no longer matters. It is no longer in 
the olive hills that I shall find my Heaven; because there is only
Hell. . .  .

Edward is dead; the girl is gone--oh, utterly gone; Leonora is
having a good  time with Rodney Bayham, and I sit alone in
Branshaw Teleragh. I have been  through Provence; I have seen
Africa; I have visited Asia to see, in Ceylon,  in a darkened room,
my poor girl, sitting motionless, with her wonderful  hair about
her, looking at me with eyes that did not see me, and saying 
distinctly: "Credo in unum Deum omnipotentem. . . . Credo in
unum Deum  omnipotentem." Those are the only reasonable words
she uttered; those are  the only words, it appears, that she ever will
utter. I suppose that they  are reasonable words; it must be
extraordinarily reasonable for her, if she  can say that she believes
in an Omnipotent Deity. Well, there it is. I am  very tired of it. all.
. . .

For, I daresay, all this may sound romantic, but it is tiring, tiring, 
tiring to have been in the midst of it; to have taken the tickets; to
have  caught the trains; to have chosen the cabins; to have
consulted the purser  and the stewards as to diet for the quiescent
patient who did nothing but  announce her belief in an Omnipotent
Deity. That may sound romantic--but it  is just a record of fatigue.

I don't know why I should always be selected to be serviceable. I
don't  resent it--but I have never been the least good. Florence
selected me for  her own purposes, and I was no good to her;
Edward called me to come and  have a chat with him, and I
couldn't stop him cutting his throat.

And then, one day eighteen months ago, I was quietly writing in
my room at  Branshaw when Leonora came to me with a letter. It
was a very pathetic  letter from Colonel Rufford about Nancy.
Colonel Rufford had left the army  and had taken up an
appointment at a tea-planting estate in Ceylon. His  letter was
pathetic because it was so brief, so inarticulate, and so 
business-like. He had gone down to the boat to meet his daughter,
and had  found his daughter quite mad. It appears that at Aden
Nancy had seen in a  local paper the news of Edward's suicide. In
the Red Sea she had gone mad.  She had remarked to Mrs Colonel
Luton, who was chaperoning her, that she  believed in an
Omnipotent Deity. She hadn't made any fuss; her eyes were  quite
dry and glassy. Even when she was mad Nancy could behave
herself.

Colonel Rufford said the doctor did not anticipate that there was
any chance  of his child's recovery. It was, nevertheless, possible
that if she could  see someone from Branshaw it might soothe her
and it might have a good  effect. And he just simply wrote to
Leonora: "Please come and see if you can  do it."

I seem to have lost all sense of the pathetic; but still, that simple, 
enormous request of the old colonel strikes me as pathetic. He was
cursed by  his atrocious temper; he had been cursed by a half-mad
wife, who drank and  went on the streets. His daughter was totally
mad--and yet he believed in  the goodness of human nature. He
believed that Leonora would take the  trouble to go all the way to
Ceylon in order to soothe his daughter. Leonora  wouldn't. Leonora
didn't ever want to see Nancy again. I daresay that that,  in the
circumstances, was natural enough. At the same time she agreed,
as it  were, on public grounds, that someone soothing ought to go
from Branshaw to  Ceylon. She sent me and her old nurse, who
had looked after Nancy from the  time when the girl, a child of
thirteen, had first come to Branshaw. So off  I go, rushing through
Provence, to catch the steamer at Marseilles. And I  wasn't the
least good when I got to Ceylon; and the nurse wasn't the least 
good. Nothing has been the least good.  The doctors said, at
Kandy, that if Nancy could be brought to England, the  sea air, the
change of climate, the voyage, and all the usual sort of  things,
might restore her reason. Of course, they haven't restored her 
reason. She is, I am aware, sitting in the hall, forty paces from
where I am  now writing. I don't want to be in the least romantic
about it. She is very  well dressed; she is quite quiet; she is very
beautiful. The old nurse looks  after her very efficiently.

Of course you have the makings of a situation here, but it is all
very  humdrum, as far as I am concerned. I should marry Nancy if
her reason were  ever sufficiently restored to let her appreciate the
meaning of the Anglican  marriage service. But it is probable that
her reason will never be  sufficiently restored to let her appreciate
the meaning of the Anglican  marriage service. Therefore I cannot
marry her, according to the law of the  land.

So here I am very much where I started thirteen years ago. I am the 
attendant, not the husband, of a beautiful girl, who pays no
attention to  me. I am estranged from Leonora, who married
Rodney Bayham in my absence and  went to live at Bayham.
Leonora rather dislikes me, because she has got it  into her head
that I disapprove of her marriage with Rodney Bayham. Well, I 
disapprove of her marriage. Possibly I am jealous. Yes, no doubt I
am  jealous. In my fainter sort of way I seem to perceive myself
following the  lines of Edward Ashburnham. I suppose that I
should really like to be a  polygamist; with Nancy, and with
Leonora, and with Maisie Maidan and  possibly even with
Florence. I am no doubt like every other man; only,  probably
because of my American origin I am fainter. At the same time I am 
able to assure you that I am a strictly respectable person. I have
never  done anything that the most anxious mother of a daughter or
the most careful  dean of a cathedral would object to. I have only
followed, faintly, and in  my unconscious desires, Edward
Ashburnham. Well, it is all over. Not one of  us has got what he
really wanted. Leonora wanted Edward, and she has got  Rodney
Bayham, a pleasant enough sort of sheep. Florence wanted
Branshaw,  and it is I who have bought it from Leonora. I didn't
really want it; what I  wanted mostly was to cease being a
nurse-attendant. Well, I am a  nurse-attendant. Edward wanted
Nancy Rufford, and I have got her. Only she  is mad. It is a queer
and fantastic world. Why can't people have what they  want? The
things were all there to content everybody; yet everybody has the 
wrong thing. Perhaps you can make head or tail of it; it is beyond
me.

Is there any terrestial paradise where, amidst the whispering of the 
olive-leaves, people can be with whom they like and have what
they like and  take their ease in shadows and in coolness? Or are
all men's lives like the  lives of us good people--like the lives of
the Ashburnhams, of the Dowells,  of the Ruffords--broken,
tumultuous, agonized, and unromantic, lives,  periods punctuated
by screams, by imbecilities, by deaths, by agonies? Who  the devil
knows? 

For there was a great deal of imbecility about the closing scenes of
the  Ashburnham tragedy. Neither of those two women knew what
they wanted. It was  only Edward who took a perfectly clear line,
and he was drunk most of the  time. But, drunk or sober, he stuck
to what was demanded by convention and  by the traditions of his
house. Nancy Rufford had to be exported to India,  and Nancy
Rufford hadn't to hear a word of love from him. She was exported 
to India and she never heard a word from Edward Ashburnham.

It was the conventional line; it was in tune with the tradition of
Edward's  house. I daresay it worked out for the greatest good of
the body politic.  Conventions and traditions, I suppose, work
blindly but surely for the  preservation of the normal type; for the
extinction of proud, resolute and  unusual individuals.

Edward was the normal man, but there was too much of the
sentimentalist  about him; and society does not need too many
sentimentalists. Nancy was a  splendid creature, but she had about
her a touch of madness. Society does  not need individuals with
touches of madness about them. So Edward and Nancy  found
themselves steamrolled out and Leonora survives, the perfectly
normal  type, married to a man who is rather like a rabbit. For
Rodney Bayham is  rather like a rabbit, and I hear that Leonora is
expected to have a baby in  three months' time.

So those splendid and tumultuous creatures with their magnetism
and their  passions--those two that I really loved--have gone from
this earth. It is no  doubt best for them. What would Nancy have
made of Edward if she had  succeeded in living with him; what
would Edward have made of her? For there  was about Nancy a
touch of cruelty--a touch of definite actual cruelty that  made her
desire to see people suffer. Yes, she desired to see Edward suffer. 
And, by God, she gave him hell.

She gave him an unimaginable hell. Those two women pursued
that poor devil  and flayed the skin off him as if they had done it
with whips. I tell you  his mind bled almost visibly. I seem to see
him stand, naked to the waist,  his forearms shielding his eyes, and
flesh hanging from him in rags. I tell  you that is no exaggeration
of what I feel. It was as if Leonora and Nancy  banded themselves
together to do execution, for the sake of humanity, upon  the body
of a man who was at their disposal. They were like a couple of 
Sioux who had got hold of an Apache and had him well tied to a
stake. I tell  you there was no end to the tortures they inflicted
upon him.

Night after night he would hear them talking; talking; maddened,
sweating,  seeking oblivion in drink, he would lie there and hear
the voices going on  and on. And day after day Leonora would
come to him and would announce the  results of their
deliberations.

They were like judges debating over the sentence upon a criminal;
they were  like ghouls with an immobile corpse in a tomb beside
them.  I don't think that Leonora was any more to blame than the
girl--though  Leonora was the more active of the two. Leonora, as I
have said, was the  perfectly normal woman. I mean to say that in
normal circumstances her  desires were those of the woman who is
needed by society. She desired  children, decorum, an
establishment; she desired to avoid waste, she desired  to keep up
appearances. She was utterly and entirely normal even in her 
utterly undeniable beauty. But I don't mean to say that she acted
perfectly  normally in this perfectly abnormal situation. All the
world was mad around  her and she herself, agonized, took on the
complexion of a mad woman; of a  woman very wicked; of the
villain of the piece. What would you have? Steel  is a normal,
hard, polished substance. But, if you put it in a hot fire it  will
become red, soft, and not to be handled. If you put it in a fire still 
more hot it will drip away. It was like that with Leonora. She was
made for  normal circumstances--for Mr Rodney Bayham, who
will keep a separate  establishment, secretly, in Portsmouth, and
make occasional trips to Paris  and to Budapest.

In the case of Edward and the girl, Leonora broke and simply went
all over  the place. She adopted unfamiliar and therefore
extraordinary and ungraceful  attitudes of mind. At one moment
she was all for revenge. After haranguing  the girl for hours
through the night she harangued for hours of the day the  silent
Edward. And Edward just once tripped up, and that was his
undoing.  Perhaps he had had too much whisky that afternoon. 
She asked him perpetually what he wanted. What did he want?
What did he  want? And all he ever answered was: "I have told
you". He meant that he  wanted the girl to go to her father in India
as soon as her father should  cable that he was ready to receive her.
But just once he tripped up. To  Leonora's eternal question he
answered that all he desired in life was  that--that he could pick
himself together again and go on with his daily  occupations if--the
girl, being five thousand miles away, would continue to  love him.
He wanted nothing more, He prayed his God for nothing more.
Well,  he was a sentimentalist.

And the moment that she heard that, Leonora determined that the
girl should  not go five thousand miles away and that she should
not continue to love  Edward. The way she worked it was this:

She continued to tell the girl that she must belong to Edward; she
was going  to get a divorce; she was going to get a dissolution of
marriage from Rome.  But she considered it to be her duty to warn
the girl of the sort of monster  that Edward was. She told the girl of
La Dolciquita, of Mrs Basil, of Maisie  Maidan, of Florence. She
spoke of the agonies that she had endured during  her life with the
man, who was violent, overbearing, vain, drunken,  arrogant, and
monstrously a prey to his sexual necessities. And, at hearing  of the
miseries her aunt had suffered--for Leonora once more had the
aspect  of an aunt to the girl--with the swift cruelty of youth and,
with the swift  solidarity that attaches woman to woman, the girl
made her resolves. Her  aunt said incessantly: "You must save
Edward's life; you must save his life.  All that he needs is a little
period of satisfaction from you. Then he will  tire of you as he has
of the others. But you must save his life."

And, all the while, that wretched fellow knew--by a curious
instinct that  runs between human beings living together--exactly
what was going on. And he  remained dumb; he stretched out no
finger to help himself. All that he  required to keep himself a
decent member of society was, that the girl, five  thousand miles
away, should continue to love him. They were putting a  stopper
upon that.

I have told you that the girl came one night to his room. And that
was the  real hell for him. That was the picture that never left his
imagination--the  girl, in the dim light, rising up at the foot of his
bed. He said that it  seemed to have a greenish sort of effect as if
there were a greenish tinge  in the shadows of the tall bedposts that
framed her body. And she looked at  him with her straight eyes of
an unflinching cruelty and she said: "I am  ready to belong to
you--to save your life."

He answered: "I don't want it; I don't want it; I don't want it."

And he says that he didn't want it; that he would have hated
himself; that  it was unthinkable. And all the while he had the
immense temptation to do  the unthinkable thing, not from the
physical desire but because of a mental  certitude. He was certain
that if she had once submitted to him she would  remain his for
ever. He knew that.

She was thinking that her aunt had said he had desired her to love
him from  a distance of five thousand miles. She said: "I can never
love you now I  know the kind of man you are. I will belong to you
to save your life. But I  can never love you."

It was a fantastic display of cruelty. She didn't in the least know
what it  meant--to belong to a man. But, at that Edward pulled
himself together. He  spoke in his normal tones; gruff, husky,
overbearing, as he would have done  to a servant or to a horse.

"Go back to your room," he said. "Go back to your room and go to
sleep. This  is all nonsense." 

They were baffled, those two women.

And then I came on the scene.

VI MY coming on the scene certainly calmed things down--for the
whole fortnight  that intervened between my arrival and the girl's
departure. I don't mean to  say that the endless talking did not go
on at night or that Leonora did not  send me out with the girl and,
in the interval, give Edward a hell of a  time. Having discovered
what he wanted--that the girl should go five  thousand miles away
and love him steadfastly as people do in sentimental  novels, she
was determined to smash that aspiration. And she repeated to 
Edward in every possible tone that the girl did not love him; that
the girl  detested him for his brutality, his overbearingness, his
drinking habits.  She pointed out that Edward in the girl's eyes, was
already pledged three or  four deep. He was pledged to Leonora
herself, to Mrs Basil, and to the  memories of Maisie Maidan and
to Florence. Edward never said anything.

Did the girl love Edward, or didn't she? I don't know. At that time I 
daresay she didn't though she certainly had done so before Leonora
had got  to work upon his reputation. She certainly had loved him
for what I call the  public side of his record--for his good
soldiering, for his saving lives at  sea, for the excellent landlord
that he was and the good sportsman. But it  is quite possible that
all those things came to appear as nothing in her  eyes when she
discovered that he wasn't a good husband. For, though women,  as
I see them, have little or no feeling of responsibility towards a
county  or a country or a career--although they may be entirely
lacking in any kind  of communal solidarity--they have an
immense and automatically working  instinct that attaches them to
the interest of womanhood. It is, of course,  possible for any
woman to cut out and to carry off any other woman's husband  or
lover. But I rather think that a woman will only do this if she has 
reason to believe that the other woman has given her husband a
bad time. I  am certain that if she thinks the man has been a brute
to his wife she will,  with her instinctive feeling for suffering
femininity, "put him back", as  the saying is. I don't attach any
particular importance to these  generalizations of mine. They may
be right, they may be wrong; I am only an  ageing American with
very little knowledge of life. You may take my  generalizations or
leave them. But I am pretty certain that I am right in  the case of
Nancy Rufford--that she had loved Edward Ashburnham very
deeply  and tenderly.

It is nothing to the point that she let him have it good and strong as
soon  as she discovered that he had been unfaithful to Leonora and
that his public  services had cost more than Leonora thought they
ought to have cost. Nancy  would be bound to let him have it good
and strong then. She would owe that  to feminine public opinion;
she would be driven to it by the instinct for  self-preservation,
since she might well imagine that if Edward had been  unfaithful
to Leonora, to Mrs Basil and to the memories of the other two, he 
might be unfaithful to herself. And, no doubt, she had her share of
the sex  instinct that makes women be intolerably cruel to the
beloved person.  Anyhow, I don't know whether, at this point,
Nancy Rufford loved Edward  Ashburnham. I don't know whether
she even loved him when, on getting, at  Aden, the news of his
suicide she went mad. Because that may just as well  have been for
the sake of Leonora as for the sake of Edward. Or it may have 
been for the sake of both of them. I don't know. I know nothing. I
am very  tired.  Leonora held passionately the doctrine that the girl
didn't love Edward. She  wanted desperately to believe that. It was
a doctrine as necessary to her  existence as a belief in the personal
immortality of the soul. She said that  it was impossible that Nancy
could have loved Edward after she had given the  girl her view of
Edward's career and character. Edward, on the other hand, 
believed maunderingly that some essential attractiveness in
himself must  have made the girl continue to go on loving him--to
go on loving him, as it  were, in underneath her official aspect of
hatred. He thought she only  pretended to hate him in order to save
her face and he thought that her  quite atrocious telegram from
Brindisi was only another attempt to do  that--to prove that she had
feelings creditable to a member of the feminine  commonweal. I
don't know. I leave it to you.  There is another point that worries
me a good deal in the aspects of this  sad affair. Leonora says that,
in desiring that the girl should go five  thousand miles away and
yet continue to love him, Edward was a monster of  selfishness. He
was desiring the ruin of a young life. Edward on the other  hand
put it to me that, supposing that the girl's love was a necessity to 
his existence, and, if he did nothing by word or by action to keep
Nancy's  love alive, he couldn't be called selfish. Leonora replied
that showed he  had an abominably selfish nature even though his
actions might be perfectly  correct. I can't make out which of them
was right. I leave it to you.

it is, at any rate, certain that Edward's actions were perfectly--were 
monstrously, were cruelly--correct. He sat still and let Leonora
take away  his character, and let Leonora damn him to deepest
hell, without stirring a  finger. I daresay he was a fool; I don't see
what object there was in  letting the girl think worse of him than
was necessary. Still there it is.  And there it is also that all those
three presented to the world the  spectacle of being the best of
good people. I assure you that during my stay  for that fortnight in
that fine old house, I never so much as noticed a  single thing that
could have affected that good opinion. And even when I  look
back, knowing the circumstances, I can't remember a single thing
any of  them said that could have betrayed them. I can't remember,
right up to the  dinner, when Leonora read out that telegram--not
the tremor of an eyelash,  not the shaking of a hand. It was just a
pleasant country house-party. 

And Leonora kept it up jolly well, for even longer than that--she
kept it up  as far as I was concerned until eight days after Edward's
funeral.  Immediately after that particular dinner--the dinner at
which I received the  announcement that Nancy was going to leave
for India on the following day--I  asked Leonora to let me have a
word with her. She took me into her little  sitting-room and I then
said--I spare you the record of my emotions--that  she was aware
that I wished to marry Nancy; that she had seemed to favour my 
suit and that it appeared to be rather a waste of money upon tickets
and  rather a waste of time upon travel to let the girl go to India if
Leonora  thought that there was any chance of her marrying me.

And Leonora, I assure you, was the absolutely perfect British
matron. She  said that she quite favoured my suit; that she could
not desire for the girl  a better husband; but that she considered
that the girl ought to see a  little more of life before taking such an
important step. Yes, Leonora used  the words "taking such an
important step". She was perfect. Actually, I  think she would have
liked the girl to marry me enough but my programme  included the
buying of the Kershaw's house about a mile away upon the 
Fordingbridge road, and settling down there with the girl. That
didn't at  all suit Leonora. She didn't want to have the girl within a
mile and a half  of Edward for the rest of their lives. Still, I think
she might have managed  to let me know, in some periphrasis or
other, that I might have the girl if  I would take her to Philadelphia
or Timbuctoo. I loved Nancy very much--and  Leonora knew it. 
However, I left it at that. I left it with the understanding that Nancy
was  going away to India on probation. It seemed to me a perfectly
reasonable  arrangement and I am a reasonable sort of man. I
simply said that I should  follow Nancy out to India after six
months' time or so. Or, perhaps, after a  year. Well, you see, I did
follow Nancy out to India after a year. . . .  I must confess to
having felt a little angry with Leonora for not having  warned me
earlier that the girl would be going. I took it as one of the  queer,
not very straight methods that Roman Catholics seem to adopt in 
dealing with matters of this world. I took it that Leonora had been
afraid I  should propose to the girl or, at any rate, have made
considerably greater  advances to her than I did, if I had known
earlier that she was going away  so soon. Perhaps Leonora was
right; perhaps Roman Catholics, with their  queer, shifty ways, are
always right. They are dealing with the queer,  shifty thing that is
human nature. For it is quite possible that, if I had  known Nancy
was going away so soon, I should have tried making love to her. 
And that would have produced another complication. It may have
been just as  well.

It is queer the fantastic things that quite good people will do in
order to  keep up their appearance of calm pococurantism. For
Edward Ashburnham and  his wife called me half the world over
in order to sit on the back seat of a  dog-cart whilst Edward drove
the girl to the railway station from which she  was to take her
departure to India. They wanted, I suppose, to have a  witness of
the calmness of that function. The girl's luggage had been  already
packed and sent off before. Her berth on the steamer had been
taken.  They had timed it all so exactly that it went like clockwork.
They had known  the date upon which Colonel Rufford would get
Edward's letter and they had  known almost exactly the hour at
which they would receive his telegram  asking his daughter to
come to him. It had all been quite beautifully and  quite
mercilessly arranged, by Edward himself. They gave Colonel
Rufford, as  a reason for telegraphing, the fact that Mrs Colonel
Somebody or other would  be travelling by that ship and that she
would serve as an efficient chaperon  for the girl. It was a most
amazing business, and I think that it would have  been better in the
eyes of God if they had all attempted to gouge out each  other's
eyes with carving knives. But they were "good people".  After my
interview with Leonora I went desultorily into Edward's gun-room.
I  didn't know where the girl was and I thought I mind find her
there. I  suppose I had a vague idea of proposing to her in spite of
Leonora. So, I  presume, I don't come of quite such good people as
the Ashburnhams. Edward  was lounging in his chair smoking a
cigar and he said nothing for quite five  minutes. The candles
glowed in the green shades; the reflections were green  in the
glasses of the book-cases that held guns and fishing-rods. Over the 
mantelpiece was the brownish picture of the white horse. Those
were the  quietest moments that I have ever known. Then,
suddenly, Edward looked me  straight in the eyes and said:

"Look here, old man, I wish you would drive with Nancy and me
to the station  tomorrow."

I said that of course I would drive with him and Nancy to the
station on the  morrow. He lay there for a long time, looking along
the line of his knees at  the fluttering fire, and then suddenly, in a
perfectly calm voice, and  without lifting his eyes, he said:

"I am so desperately in love with Nancy Rufford that I am dying of
it."

Poor devil--he hadn't meant to speak of it. But I guess he just had
to speak  to somebody and I appeared to be like a woman or a
solicitor. He talked all  night. 

Well, he carried out the programme to the last breath.

It was a very clear winter morning, with a good deal of frost in it.
The sun  was quite bright, the winding road between the heather
and the bracken was  very hard. I sat on the back-seat of the
dog-cart; Nancy was beside Edward.  They talked about the way
the cob went; Edward pointed out with the whip a  cluster of deer
upon a coombe three-quarters of a mile away. We passed the 
hounds in the level bit of road beside the high trees going into 
Fordingbridge and Edward pulled up the dog-cart so that Nancy
might say  good-bye to the huntsman and cap him a last sovereign.
She had ridden with  those hounds ever since she had been
thirteen.

The train was five minutes late and they imagined that that was
because it  was market-day at Swindon or wherever the train came
from. That was the sort  of thing they talked about. The train came
in; Edward found her a  first-class carriage with an elderly woman
in it. The girl entered the  carriage, Edward closed the door and
then she put out her hand to shake  mine. There was upon those
people's faces no expression of any kind  whatever. The signal for
the train's departure was a very bright red; that  is about as
passionate a statement as I can get into that scene. She was not 
looking her best; she had on a cap of brown fur that did not very
well match  her hair. She said:

"So long," to Edward.

Edward answered: "So long."

He swung round on his heel and, large, slouching, and walking
with a heavy  deliberate pace, he went out of the station. I
followed him and got up  beside him in the high dog-cart. It was
the most horrible performance I have  ever seen.

And, after that, a holy peace, like the peace of God which passes
all  understanding, descended upon Branshaw Teleragh. Leonora
went about her  daily duties with a sort of triumphant smile--a very
faint smile, but quite  triumphant. I guess she had so long since
given up any idea of getting her  man back that it was enough for
her to have got the girl out of the house  and well cured of her
infatuation. Once, in the hall, when Leonora was going  out,
Edward said, beneath his breath--but I just caught the words:

"Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean."  It was like his
sentimentality to quote Swinburne.  But he was perfectly quiet and
he had given up drinking. The only thing that  he ever said to me
after that drive to the station was:

"It's very odd. I think I ought to tell you, Dowell, that I haven't any 
feelings at all about the girl now it's all over. Don't you worry
about me.  I'm all right." A long time afterwards he said: "I guess it
was only a flash  in the pan." He began to look after the estates
again; he took all that  trouble over getting off the gardener's
daughter who had murdered her baby.  He shook hands smilingly
with every farmer in the market-place. He addressed  two political
meetings; he hunted twice. Leonora made him a frightful scene 
about spending the two hundred pounds on getting the gardener's
daughter  acquitted. Everything went on as if the girl had never
existed. It was very  still weather.

 Well, that is the end of the story. And, when I come to look at it I
see  that it is a happy ending with wedding bells and all. The
villains--for  obviously Edward and the girl were villains--have
been punished by suicide  and madness. The heroine--the perfectly
normal, virtuous and slightly  deceitful heroine--has become the
happy wife of a perfectly normal, virtuous  and slightly deceitful
husband. She will shortly become a mother of a  perfectly normal,
virtuous slightly deceitful son or daughter. A happy  ending, that is
what it works out at.

I cannot conceal from myself the fact that I now dislike Leonora.
Without  doubt I am jealous of Rodney Bayham. But I don't know
whether it is merely a  jealousy arising from the fact that I desired
myself to possess Leonora or  whether it is because to her were
sacrificed the only two persons that I  have ever really
loved--Edward Ashburnham and Nancy Rufford. In order to set 
her up in a modern mansion, replete with every convenience and
dominated by  a quite respectable and eminently economical
master of the house, it was  necessary that Edward and Nancy
Rufford should become, for me at least, no  more than tragic
shades.

I seem to see poor Edward, naked and reclining amidst darkness,
upon cold  rocks, like one of the ancient Greek damned, in
Tartarus or wherever it was.

And as for Nancy . . . Well, yesterday at lunch she said suddenly:

"Shuttlecocks!"

And she repeated the word "shuttlecocks" three times. I know what
was  passing in her mind, if she can be said to have a mind, for
Leonora has told  me that, once, the poor girl said she felt like a
shuttlecock being tossed  backwards and forwards between the
violent personalities of Edward and his  wife. Leonora, she said,
was always trying to deliver her over to Edward,  and Edward
tacitly and silently forced her back again. And the odd thing was 
that Edward himself considered that those two women used him
like a  shuttlecock. Or, rather, he said that they sent him backwards
and forwards  like a blooming parcel that someone didn't want to
pay the postage on. And  Leonora also imagined that Edward and
Nancy picked her up and threw her down  as suited their purely
vagrant moods. So there you have the pretty picture.  Mind, I am
not preaching anything contrary to accepted morality. I am not 
advocating free love in this or any other case. Society must go on, I 
suppose, and society can only exist if the normal, if the virtuous,
and the  slightly deceitful flourish, and if the passionate, the
headstrong, and the  too-truthful are condemned to suicide and to
madness. But I guess that I  myself, in my fainter way, come into
the category of the passionate, of the  headstrong, and the
too-truthful. For I can't conceal from myself the fact  that I loved
Edward Ashburnham--and that I love him because he was just 
myself. If I had had the courage and virility and possibly also the
physique  of Edward Ashburnham I should, I fancy, have done
much what he did. He seems  to me like a large elder brother who
took me out on several excursions and  did many dashing things
whilst I just watched him robbing the orchards, from  a distance.
And, you see, I am just as much of a sentimentalist as he was. .  . .

Yes, society must go on; it must breed, like rabbits. That is what
we are  here for. But then, I don't like society--much. I am that
absurd figure, an  American millionaire, who has bought one of the
ancient haunts of English  peace. I sit here, in Edward's gun-room,
all day and all day in a house that  is absolutely quiet. No one visits
me, for I visit no one. No one is  interested in me, for I have no
interests. In twenty minutes or so I shall  walk down to the village,
beneath my own oaks, alongside my own clumps of  gorse, to get
the American mail. My tenants, the village boys and the 
tradesmen will touch their hats to me. So life peters out. I shall
return to  dine and Nancy will sit opposite me with the old nurse
standing behind her.  Enigmatic, silent, utterly well-behaved as far
as her knife and fork go,  Nancy will stare in front of her with the
blue eyes that have over them  strained, stretched brows. Once, or
perhaps twice, during the meal her knife  and fork will be
suspended in mid-air as if she were trying to think of  something
that she had forgotten. Then she will say that she believes in an 
Omnipotent Deity or she will utter the one word "shuttle-cocks",
perhaps. It  is very extraordinary to see the perfect flush of health
on her cheeks, to  see the lustre of her coiled black hair, the poise
of the head upon the  neck, the grace of the white hands--and to
think that it all means  nothing--that it is a picture without a
meaning. Yes, it is queer.

But, at any rate, there is always Leonora to cheer you up; I don't
want to  sadden you. Her husband is quite an economical person of
so normal a figure  that he can get quite a large proportion of his
clothes ready-made. That is  the great desideratum of life, and that
is the end of my story. The child is  to be brought up as a
Romanist. 

It suddenly occurs to me that I have forgotten to say how Edward
met his  death. You remember that peace had descended upon the
house; that Leonora  was quietly triumphant and that Edward said
his love for the girl had been  merely a passing phase. Well, one
afternoon we were in the stables together,  looking at a new kind
of flooring that Edward was trying in a loose-box.  Edward was
talking with a good deal of animation about the necessity of 
getting the numbers of the Hampshire territorials up to the proper
standard.  He was quite sober, quite quiet, his skin was
clear-coloured; his hair was  golden and perfectly brushed; the
level brick-dust red of his complexion  went clean up to the rims
of his eyelids; his eyes were porcelain blue and  they regarded me
frankly and directly. His face was perfectly  expressionless; his
voice was deep and rough. He stood well back upon his  legs and
said: .

"We ought to get them up to two thousand three hundred and
fifty." A  stable-boy brought him a telegram and went away. He
opened it negligently,  regarded it without emotion, and, in
complete silence, handed it to me. On  the pinkish paper in a
sprawled handwriting I read: "Safe Brindisi. Having  rattling good
time. Nancy."

Well, Edward was the English gentleman; but he was also, to the
last, a  sentimentalist, whose mind was compounded of indifferent
poems and novels.  He just looked up to the roof of the stable, as if
he were looking to  Heaven, and whispered something that I did
not catch.

Then he put two fingers into the waistcoat pocket of his grey,
frieze suit;  they came out with a little neat pen-knife--quite a
small pen-knife. He said  to me:

"You might just take that wire to Leonora." And he looked at me
with a  direct, challenging, brow-beating glare. I guess he could
see in my eyes  that I didn't intend to hinder him. Why should I
hinder him?

I didn't think he was wanted in the world, let his confounded
tenants, his  rifle-associations, his drunkards, reclaimed and
unreclaimed, get on as they  liked. Not all the hundreds and
hundreds of them deserved that that poor  devil should go on
suffering for their sakes.

When he saw that I did not intend to interfere with him his eyes
became soft  and almost affectionate. He remarked:

"So long, old man, I must have a bit of a rest, you know."

I didn't know what to say. I wanted to say, "God bless you", for I
also am a  sentimentalist. But I thought that perhaps that would not
be quite English  good form, so I trotted off with the telegram to
Leonora. She was quite  pleased with it.





End of The Project Gutenberg Etext The Good Soldier, by Ford Madox Ford

