Mrs. Pendomer’s foot tapped the floor whilst he spoke.  When he had made an ending, she inclined her head toward him.

“Thank you!” said Mrs. Pendomer.

Colonel Musgrave bit his lip; and he flushed.

“That,” said he, hastily, “was different.”

But the difference, whatever may have been its nature, was seemingly a matter of unimportance to Mrs. Pendomer, who was in meditation.  She rested her ample chin on a much-bejeweled hand for a moment; and, when Mrs. Pendomer raised her face, her voice was free from affectation.

“You will probably never understand that this particular July day is a crucial point in your life.  You will probably remember it, if you remember it at all, simply as that morning when Patricia found some girl-or-another’s old letters, and behaved rather unreasonably about them.  It was the merest trifle, you will think....  John Charteris understands women better than you do, Rudolph.”

“I need not pretend at this late day to be as clever as Jack,” the colonel said, in some bewilderment.  “But why not more succinctly state that the Escurial is not a dromedary, although there are many flies in France?  For what on earth has Jack to do with crucial points and July mornings?”

“Why, I suppose, I only made bold to introduce his name for the sake of an illustration, Rudolph.  For the last person in the world to realize, precisely, why any woman did anything is invariably the woman who did it....  Yet there comes in every married woman’s existence that time when she realizes, suddenly, that her husband has a past which might be taken as, in itself, a complete and rounded life—­as a life which had run the gamut of all ordinary human passions, and had become familiar with all ordinary human passions a dishearteningly long while before she ever came into that life.  A woman never realizes that of her lover, somehow.  But to know that your husband, the father of your child, has lived for other women a life in which you had no part, and never can have part!—­she realizes that, at one time or another, and—­and it sickens her.”  Mrs. Pendomer smiled as she echoed his phrase, but her eyes were not mirthful.

“Ah, she hungers for those dead years, Rudolph, and, though you devote your whole remaining life to her, nothing can ever make up for them; and she always hates those shadowy women who have stolen them from her.  A woman never, at heart, forgives the other women who have loved her husband, even though she cease to care for him herself.  For she remembers—­ah, you men forget so easily, Rudolph!  God had not invented memory when he created Adam; it was kept for the woman.”

Then ensued a pause, during which Rudolph Musgrave smiled down upon her, irresolutely; for he abhorred “a scene,” as his vernacular phrased it, and to him Clarice’s present manner bordered upon both the scenic and the incomprehensible.

“Ah!—­you women!” he temporized.