absorbing business, the haste and obstruction of the
city. Lucy was not beautiful enough or splendid enough to attract much
attention from the passers-by in the streets, though one or two
sympathetic and observant wayfarers were caught by the look of trouble
in her face. She had never walked about London, and she did not know
where she was going. But she did not think of this. She thought only on
one subject,--about her husband and that other life which he had, of
which she knew nothing, which might, for anything she could tell, have
been going on side by side with the life she knew and shared. This was
the point upon which Lucy's mind had given way. The revelation as to
Bice had startled and shaken her soul to its foundations; but after the
shock things had fallen into their place again, and she had felt no
anger, though much pain and pity. Her mind had thrown itself back into
the unknown past almost tenderly towards the mother who had died long
ago, to whom perhaps Bice had been what little Tom was now to herself.
But when the further statement reached her ears all that softening which
seemed to have swept over her disappeared in a moment. A horrible
bewilderment had seized her. Was he two men, with two wives, two lives,
two children dear to him?

It is usual to talk of women as being the most severe judges of each
other's failures in one particular at least, an accusation which no
doubt is true of both sexes, though generally applied, like so many
universal truths, to one. And an injured wife is a raging fury in those
primitive characterisations which are so common in the world. But the
ideas which circled like the flakes in a snowstorm through the mind of
Lucy were of a kind incomprehensible to the vulgar critic who judges
humanity in the general. Her ways of thinking, her modes of judging were
as different as possible from those of minds accustomed to
generalisation and lightly acquainted with the vices of the world. Lucy
knew no general; she knew three persons involved in an imbroglio so
terrible that she saw no way out of it. Herself, her husband, another
woman. Her mind was the mind almost of a child. It had resisted all that
dismal information which the chatter of society conveys. She knew that
married people were "not happy" sometimes. She knew that there were
wretched stories of which she held that they could not be true. She was
of Desdemona's mind, and did not believe that there was any such woman.
And when