," persisted Jephson; "I've known selfishness--selfishness
according to the ordinarily accepted meaning of the term--to be
productive of good actions. I can give you an instance, if you like."

"Has it got a moral?" asked MacShaugnassy, drowsily.

Jephson mused a moment. "Yes," he at length said; "a very practical
moral--and one very useful to young men."

"That's the sort of story we want," said MacShaugnassy, raising himself
into a sitting position. "You listen to this, Brown."

Jephson seated himself upon a chair, in his favourite attitude, with his
elbows resting upon the back, and smoked for awhile in silence.

"There are three people in this story," he began; "the wife, the wife's
husband, and the other man. In most dramas of this type, it is the wife
who is the chief character. In this case, the interesting person is the
other man.

"The wife--I saw her once: she was the most beautiful woman I have ever
seen, and the most wicked-looking; which is saying a good deal for both
statements. I remember, during a walking tour one year, coming across a
lovely little cottage. It was the sweetest place imaginable. I need not
describe it. It was the cottage one sees in pictures, and reads of in
sentimental poetry. I was leaning over the neatly-cropped hedge,
drinking in its beauty, when at one of the tiny casements I saw, looking
out at me, a face. It stayed there only for a moment, but in that moment
the cottage had become ugly, and I hurried away with a shudder.

"That woman's face reminded me of the incident. It was an angel's face,
until the woman herself looked out of it: then you were struck by the
strange incongruity between tenement and tenant.

"That at one time she had loved her husband, I have little doubt.
Vicious women have few vices, and sordidness is not usually one of them.
She had probably married him, borne towards him by one of those waves of
passion upon which the souls of animal natures are continually rising
and falling. On possession, however, had quickly followed satiety, and
from satiety had grown the desire for a new sensation.

"They were living at Cairo at the period; her husband held an important
official position there, and by virtue of this, and of her own beauty
and tact, her house soon became the centre of the Anglo-Saxon society
ever drifting in and out of the city. The women disliked her, and copied
her. The men spoke slightingly of her to their wives, lightly of her to
each other