woman,
particularly his own woman, is a thing so fine and so precious that
the winds of heaven should hardly be allowed to blow upon her. He
cannot bear to think that people should even talk of his wife. And
yet, Heaven knows, poor fellow, I have given people occasion enough
to talk of me. And he has a much higher chivalry than that of the old
poets. They, or their heroes, watched their women because they did
not want to have trouble about them,--shut them up in castles, kept
them in ignorance, and held them as far as they could out of harm's
way."

"I hardly think they succeeded," said Mrs. Finn.

"But in pure selfishness they tried all they could. But he is too
proud to watch. If you and I were hatching treason against him in the
dark, and chance had brought him there, he would stop his ears with
his fingers. He is all trust, even when he knows that he is being
deceived. He is honour complete from head to foot. Ah, it was before
you knew me when I tried him the hardest. I never could quite tell
you that story, and I won't try it now; but he behaved like a god. I
could never tell him what I felt,--but I felt it."

"You ought to love him."

"I do;--but what's the use of it? He is a god, but I am not a
goddess;--and then, though he is a god, he is a dry, silent,
uncongenial and uncomfortable god. It would have suited me much
better to have married a sinner. But then the sinner that I would
have married was so irredeemable a scapegrace."

"I do not believe in a woman marrying a bad man in the hope of making
him good."

"Especially not when the woman is naturally inclined to evil herself.
It will half kill him when he reads all this about me. He has read it
already, and it has already half killed him. For myself I do not mind
it in the least, but for his sake I mind it much. It will rob him
of his only possible answer to the accusation. The very thing which
this wretch in the newspaper says he will say, and that he will be
disgraced by saying, is the very thing that he ought to say. And
there would be no disgrace in it,--beyond what I might well bear for
my little fault, and which I could bear so easily."

"Shall you speak to him about it?"

"No; I dare not. In this matter it has gone beyond speaking. I
suppose he does talk it over with the old Duke; but he will say
nothing to me about it,--unless he were to tell me that he had
resigned, and that we were to start off and live in Minorca for the
next ten years.