thing as best I could--a labour of love. But
it's nothing like Tom Castleton's work--which she thinks is Adrian's. To
keep up the deception I had to crab it and say that the faults were
mine. Naturally she believes me."

"All right," said I, again. "And when the book is published and Adrian's
memory flattered and Doria is assured of her mental and moral
balance--what then?"

"I hope she'll be happy," he answered. "Why the blazes do you suppose
I've worried if it wasn't to give her happiness?"

I could not press my point. I could not commit the gross indelicacy of
saying: "My poor friend, where do you come in?" or words to that effect.
Nor could I possibly lay down the proposition that a living second
husband--stretching the imagination to the hypothesis of her taking
one--is but an indifferent hero to the widow who spends her life in
burning incense before the shrine of the demigod husband who is dead. We
can't say these things to our friends. We expect them to have common
sense as we have ourselves. But we don't, and--for the curious reason,
based on the intense individualism of sexual attraction, that no man can
appreciate, save intellectually, another man's desire for a particular
woman--we can't realize the poor, fool hunger of his heart. The man who
pours into our ears a torrential tale of passion moves us not to
sympathy, but rather to psychological speculation, if we are kindly
disposed, or to murderous inclinations if we are not. On the other
hand, he who is silent moves us not at all. In any and every case,
however, we entirely fail to comprehend why, if Neaera is obdurate, our
swain does not go afield and find, as assuredly he can, some complaisant
Amaryllis.

I confess, honestly, that during this conversation I felt somewhat
impatient with my dear, infatuated friend. There he was, casting the
largesse of his soul at the feet of a blind woman, a woman blinded by
the bedazzlement of a false fire, whose flare it was his religion to
intensify. There he was doing this, and he did not see the imbecility of
it! In after time we can correlate incidents and circumstances, viewing
them in a perspective more or less correct. We see that we might have
said and done a hundred helpful things. Well, we know that we did not,
and there's an end on't. I felt, as I say, impatient with Jaffery,
although--or was it because?--I recognised the bald fact that he was in
love with Doria to the maximum degree of besottedness.

Y