and she was quite sure that no
human being so heavy, so slow, and so incapable of two concurrent
ideas as John Crumb had ever been produced in the United States;--but,
nevertheless, she liked Mrs Pipkin, and almost loved John Crumb. How
different would her life have been could she have met a man who would
have been as true to her as John Crumb was to his Ruby!

She loved Paul Montague with all her heart, and she despised herself
for loving him. How weak he was;--how inefficient; how unable to seize
glorious opportunities; how swathed and swaddled by scruples and
prejudices;--how unlike her own countrymen in quickness of apprehension
and readiness of action! But yet she loved him for his very faults,
telling herself that there was something sweeter in his English
manners than in all the smart intelligence of her own land. The man
had been false to her,--false as hell; had sworn to her and had broken
his oath; had ruined her whole life; had made everything blank before
her by his treachery! But then she also had not been quite true with
him. She had not at first meant to deceive;--nor had he. They had
played a game against each other; and he, with all the inferiority of
his intellect to weigh him down, had won,--because he was a man. She
had much time for thinking, and she thought much about these things. He
could change his love as often as he pleased, and be as good a lover
at the end as ever;--whereas she was ruined by his defection. He could
look about for a fresh flower and boldly seek his honey; whereas she
could only sit and mourn for the sweets of which she had been rifled.
She was not quite sure that such mourning would not be more bitter to
her in California than in Mrs Pipkin's solitary lodgings at Islington.

'So he was Mr Montague's partner,--was he now?' asked Mrs Pipkin a day
or two after their return from the Crumb marriage. For Mr Fisker had
called on Mrs Hurtle, and Mrs Hurtle had told Mrs Pipkin so much. 'To
my thinking now he's a nicer man than Mr Montague.' Mrs Pipkin
perhaps thought that as her lodger had lost one partner she might be
anxious to secure the other;--perhaps felt, too, that it might be well
to praise an American at the expense of an Englishman.

'There's no accounting for tastes, Mrs Pipkin.'

'And that's true, too, Mrs Hurtle.'

'Mr Montague is a gentleman.'

'I always did say that of him, Mrs Hurtle.'

'And Mr Fisker is--an American citizen.' Mrs Hurtle when she said this
was