hers
he had only recently become informed.

And as he spoke he felt, with a strange oppression, the heart beside him
grow dumb. For this woman, with her clear and gracious understanding of
so many human ills and weaknesses, had been kept in one matter, the most
important of all, with the mind of an undeveloped child. Evil things she
knew of--they had an existence, a place, and a name--but for her no
reality except in their awful results. All that she had hitherto seen of
"irregular living" bore the stamp of betrayal and disease, a thing more
grossly criminal than anything else in the social body. She did not know
how that body was permeated, and how no class and no ordinary standard
of morality was free from the taint.

And now she heard that the man she loved had been keeping that thing
called "a mistress"--housing her in luxury, visiting her day after day,
not very greatly troubling himself whether the fact remained secret or
became known. Then dates were mentioned; and she was given to know how
those visits had still gone on while her lover had been offering her the
devotion of his heart. It was there, after his recent accident, that he
had gone to be nursed.

The Archbishop was extremely well informed, and he told nothing which
he did not absolutely believe to be true. And now at last all the
advantage was on his side, for ignorance left her almost without
defense; with no sense of proportion she stood looking out into a
non-dimensional world.

Dimly her mind made a struggle to escape.

"But what, what does it mean?" she asked. "There must be some reason for
it. Is it a kind of disease?"

"A corrupt nature," said her father solemnly; "these are what the Church
calls in her teaching 'the sins of the flesh.'"

She shuddered, for to her by religious training "flesh" had come to have
a dreadful sound. In her spiritual world she pictured it as a shop hung
with butcher's meat; yet why it was dreadful she did not know.

"Tell me," she murmured with pained speech, still trying for a way out,
"it isn't--natural, is it?"

"That doctrine is preached by some," said her father; "Christianity
forbids any such view."

"He said," she went on, "he said this, when he first asked me to marry
him: 'I have done some natural things which you would hold to be wrong.
I have loved,' he said, 'for mere comfort, not for honor or life.' He
asked me if I understood; I said 'Yes.' 'That is my confession,' he
said. 'I have been,' he