for instance, was no doubt, and probably still is, very fond of you.  You are a charming young man, with nice eyes and a taking way with women, and she would very much have liked to marry you; but then she also liked her cousin’s estates.  She could not have both, and, being forced to choose, she chose the latter.  You should take a common-sense view of the matter; you are not the first who has suffered.  Women, especially young women, who do not understand the value of affection, must be very much in love before they submit to the self-sacrifice that is supposed to be characteristic of them, and what men talk of as stains upon them they do not consider as such.  They know, if they know nothing else, that a good income and an establishment will make them perfectly clean in the opinion of their own small world—­a little world of shams and forms that cares nothing for the spirit of the moral law, provided the letter is acted up to.  It is by this that they mark their standard of personal virtues, not by the high rule you men imagine for them.  There is no social fuller’s soap so effectual as money and position.”

“You speak like a book, and give your own sex a high character.  Tell me, then, would you do such a thing?”

“I, Arthur?  How can you ask me?  I had rather be torn to pieces by wild horses.  I spoke of the majority of the women, not of them all.”

“Ah, and yet she could do it, and I thought her better than you.”

“I do not think that you should speak bitterly of her, Arthur; I think that you should be sorry for her.”

“Sorry for her?  Why?”

“Because from what I have gathered about her, she is not quite an ordinary young woman:  however badly she may have treated you, she is a person of refined feelings and susceptibilities.  Is it not so?”

“Without a doubt.”

“Well, then, you should pity her, because she will bitterly expiate her mistake.  For myself, I do not pity her much, because I will not waste my sympathy on a fool; for, to my mind, the woman who could do what she has done, and deliberately throw away everything that can make life really worth living to us women, is a most contemptible fool.  But you love her, and, therefore, you should be sorry for her.”

“But why?”

“Because she is a woman who at one-and-twenty has buried all the higher part of life, who has, of her own act, for ever deprived herself of joys that nothing else can bring her.  Love, true love, is almost the only expression, of which we women are capable, of all the nobler instincts and vague yearnings after what is higher and better than the things we see and feel around us.  When we love most, and love happily, then we are at our topmost bent, and soar further above the earth than anything else can carry us.  Consequently, when a woman is faithless to her love, which is the purest and most honourable part of her, the very best thing to which she can attain, she clips her wings,