rtly because she read widely and had
never been restricted in the choice of books. She was not a mere
ignorant child, shrinking from knowledge as if it were contamination,
and blindly believing in the goodness and innocence of all men. But this
theoretical acquaintance with the world had not saved her from the error
into which women are apt to fall--the error of setting up her lover on a
pedestal and believing that he was not as other men. She was punished
for her mistake, she told herself bitterly, by finding that he was even
worse, not better, than other men, whose weaknesses she had contemned.

For there had been a strain of meanness and cruelty in Sydney's behavior
to the girl whom he had ruined which cut his wife to the heart. She had
been taught, and she had tried--with some misgiving--to believe that she
ought to be prepared to condone a certain amount of levity, of
"wildness," even, in her husband's past; but here she saw deliberate
treachery, cold-blooded selfishness, which startled her from her dream
of happiness. Nan was a little too logical for her own peace of mind.
She could not look at an action as an isolated fact in a man's life: it
was an outcome of character. What Sydney had done showed Sydney as he
was. And, oh, what a fall was there! how different from the ideal that
she had hoped to see realized in him!

It never once occurred to Nan to take either Sir John or Lady Pynsent
into her confidence. Sydney was quite mistaken in thinking that she
would fly to them for consolation. She would have shrunk sensitively
from telling them any story to his discredit. Besides, she shrewdly
suspected that they would not share her disappointment, her sense of
disillusion; Sir John had more than once laughed in an oddly amused way
when she dropped a word in praise of Sydney's high-mindedness and
generous zeal for others. "Campion knows which side his bread's
buttered," he had once made her angry by saying. She had not the
slightest inclination to talk to them of Sydney's past life and
character.

Besides, she knew well enough that she had no actual cause of complaint
in the eyes of the world. Her husband was not bound to tell her all that
happened to him before he met her; and he had severed all connection
with that unhappy young woman before he asked her, Anna Pynsent, to be
his wife. Nan's grievance was one of those intangible grievances which
bring the lines into so many women's faces and the pathos into their