ve a
jolly evening."

I hesitated.

"Has it occurred to you that your wife is frightfully unhappy?"

"She'll get over it."

I cannot describe the extraordinary callousness with which he
made this reply. It disconcerted me, but I did my best not to
show it. I adopted the tone used by my Uncle Henry,
a clergyman, when he was asking one of his relatives for a
subscription to the Additional Curates Society.

"You don't mind my talking to you frankly?"

He shook his head, smiling.

"Has she deserved that you should treat her like this?"

"No."

"Have you any complaint to make against her?"

"None."

"Then, isn't it monstrous to leave her in this fashion,
after seventeen years of married life, without a fault
to find with her?"

"Monstrous."

I glanced at him with surprise. His cordial agreement with
all I said cut the ground from under my feet. It made my
position complicated, not to say ludicrous. I was prepared to
be persuasive, touching, and hortatory, admonitory and
expostulating, if need be vituperative even, indignant and
sarcastic; but what the devil does a mentor do when the sinner
makes no bones about confessing his sin? I had no experience,
since my own practice has always been to deny everything.

"What, then?" asked Strickland.

I tried to curl my lip.

"Well, if you acknowledge that, there doesn't seem much more
to be said."

"I don't think there is."

I felt that I was not carrying out my embassy with any great skill.
I was distinctly nettled.

"Hang it all, one can't leave a woman without a bob."

"Why not?"

"How is she going to live?"

"I've supported her for seventeen years. Why shouldn't she
support herself for a change?"

"She can't."

"Let her try."

Of course there were many things I might have answered to this.
I might have spoken of the economic position of woman,
of the contract, tacit and overt, which a man accepts by his
marriage, and of much else; but I felt that there was only one
point which really signified.

"Don't you care for her any more?"

"Not a bit," he replied.

The matter was immensely serious for all the parties concerned,
but there was in the manner of his answer such a cheerful
effrontery that I had to bite my lips in order not to laugh.
I reminded myself that his behaviour was abominable.
I worked myself up into a state of moral indignation.

"Damn it all, there are your children to think of.
They've never done you any harm. Th