to speak.

'Honestly!' she cried, looking up. 'Honestly! No! If I loved him, could I
have been so upset about Crettell? But we have been together so long. We
are husband and wife, Carlotta. We are so used to each other. And
generally he is so good. We've got on very well, considering. And now
he's left me. Think of the scandal! It will be terrible! terrible! A
separation at my age! Carlotta, it's unthinkable! He's mad--that's the
only explanation. Haven't I tried to be a good wife to him? He's never
found fault with me--never! And I'm sure, as regards him, I've had
nothing to complain of.'

'He will come back,' I said. 'He'll think things over and see reason.'

And it was just as though I heard some other person saying these words.

'But he didn't come _home_ last night,' Mary insisted. 'What the servants
are thinking I shouldn't like to guess.'

'What does it matter what the servants think?' I said brusquely.

'But it _does_ matter. He didn't come _home_. He must have slept at a
hotel. Fancy, sleeping at a hotel, and his home waiting for him! Oh,
Carlotta, you're too young to understand what I feel! You're very clever,
and you're very sympathetic; but you can't see things as I see them. Wait
till you've been married fifteen years. The scandal! The shame! And me
only too anxious to be a good wife, and to keep our home as it should be,
and to help him as much as I can with my stupid brains in his business!'

'I can understand perfectly,' I asserted. 'I can understand perfectly.'

And I could. The futility of arguing with Mary, of attempting to free her
ever so little from the coils of convention which had always bound her,
was only too plainly apparent. She was--and naturally, sincerely,
instinctively--the very incarnation and mouthpiece of the
conventionality of society, as she cowered there in her grief and her
quiet resentment. But this did not impair the authenticity of her grief
and her resentment. Her grief appealed to me powerfully, and her
resentment, almost angelic in its quality, seemed sufficiently justified.
I knew that my own position was in practice untenable, that logic must
always be inferior to emotion. I am intensely proud of my ability to see,
then, that no sentiment can be false which is sincere, and that Mary
Ispenlove's attitude towards marriage was exactly as natural, exactly as
free from artificiality, as my own. Can you go outside Nature? Is not the
polity of Londoners in London as much a