lt as if
I were throwing myself over a precipice but I answered:

"It is perfectly true."

I think that was the last thing he expected. After a moment he said:

"Then you have broken your marriage vows--is that it?"

"Yes, if you call it so."

"Call it so? Call it so? Good heavens, what do _you_ call it?"

I did not reply, and after another moment he said:

"But perhaps you wish me to understand that this man whom I was so
foolish as to invite to my house abused my hospitality and betrayed my
wife. Is that what you mean?"

"No," I said. "He observed the laws of hospitality much better than you
did, and if I am betrayed I betrayed myself."

I shall never forget the look with which my husband received this
confession. He drew himself up with the air of an injured man and said:

"What? You mean that you yourself . . . deliberately . . . Good God!"

He stopped for a moment and then said with a rush:

"I suppose you've not forgotten what happened at the time of our
marriage . . . your resistance and the ridiculous compact I submitted
to? Why did I submit? Because I thought your innocence, your
convent-bred ideas, and your ignorance of the first conditions of
matrimony. . . . But I've been fooled, for you now tell me . . . after
all my complacency . . . that you have deliberately. . . . In the name
of God do you know what you are? There's only one name for a woman who
does what you've done. Do you want me to tell you what that name is?"

I was quivering with shame, but my mind, which was going at lightning
speed, was thinking of London, of Cairo, of Rome, and of Paris.

"Why don't you speak?" he cried, lifting his voice in his rage. "Don't
you understand what a letter like this is calling you?"

My heart choked. But the thought that came to me--that, bad as his own
life had been, he considered he had a right to treat me in this way
because he was a man and I was a woman--brought strength out of my
weakness, so that when he went on to curse my Church and my religion,
saying this was all that had come of "the mummery of my masses," I fired
up for a moment and said:

"You can spare yourself these blasphemies. If I have done wrong, it is
I, and not my Church, that is to blame for it."

"_If_ you have done wrong!" he cried. "Damn it, have you lost all sense
of a woman's duty to her husband? While you have been married to me and
I have been fool enough not to claim you as a wife because I thought you
were only f