But there are exceptions to all modes of feeling and of reasoning.

Here is Alice Duvernois:  she is a woman of good position, of intellectual quickness, of unusual sensitiveness of spirit; yet she has thought out this woeful question differently from the great majority of her sex.  To her, thirsty for sympathy and love, bound to a man who gives her neither, grown feverish and delirious with the torment of an empty heart, it has seemed that the sanctity of a second marriage will somehow cover the violation of a first.

This aberration we can only explain on the ground that she was one of those natures—­mature in some respects, but strangely childlike in others—­whom most of us love to stigmatize as unpractical, and who in fact never become quite accustomed to this world and its rules.

On the very evening of her arrival home she put to her husband a question of infantile and almost incredible simplicity.  It was one of the many observations which made him tell her from time to time that she was a fool.

“What do they do,” she asked, “to women who marry two husbands?”

“They put them in jail,” was his cool reply.

“I think it is brutal,” she broke out indignantly, as if the iron gates were already closing upon her, and she were contesting the justice of the punishment.

“You are a pretty simpleton, to set up your opinion against that of all civilized society!” was the response of incarnate Reason.

From that moment she trembled at her danger, and quivered under the remorse which terror brings.  At times she thought of flying, of abandoning the husband who did not love her for the one who did; but she was afraid of being pursued, afraid of discovery.  The knowledge that society had already passed judgment upon her made her see herself in the new light of a criminal, friendless, hunted and doomed.  The penalty of her illegal grasp after happiness was already tracking her like a bloodhound.

Yet when she further learned that her second marriage was not binding because of the first, her heart rose in mutiny.  Faithful to the only love that there had been for her in the world, she repeated to herself, a hundred times a day, “It is binding—­it is!”

She was in dark insurrection against her kind; at times she was on the point of bursting out into open defiance.  She stared at Duvernois, crazy to tell him, “I am wedded to another.”

He noticed the wild expression, the longing, wide-open eyes, the parted and eager lips, the trembling chin.  At last he said, with a brutality which had become customary with him, “What are you putting on those airs for?  I suppose you are imagining yourself the heroine of a romance.”

With a glare of pain and scorn she walked away from him in silence.

It is shocking indeed to be fastened speechless upon a rack, and to be charged by uncomprehending souls with counterfeiting emotion.  She was so constituted that she could not help laying up this speech of her husband’s against him as one of many stolid misdoings which justified both contempt and aversion.  In fact, his inability or unwillingness to comprehend her had always been, in her searching and sensitive eyes, his chief crime.  To be understood, to be accepted at her full worth, was one of the most urgent demands of her nature.