She had made a fool of herself.

She knew it; he knew it; everybody knew it in the parish they had left five months ago.  It had been the talk of the little southern seaside town.  He thanked God that nobody knew it, or was ever likely to know it, here.

For Alice’s folly was not any ordinary folly.  It was the kind that made the parish which was so aware of it uninhabitable to a sensitive vicar.

He reflected that she would be clever if she made a fool of herself here.  By his decisive action in removing her from that southern seaside town he had saved her from continuing her work.  In order to do it he had ruined his prospects.  He had thrown up a good living for a poor one; a living that might (but for Alice it certainly would) have led to preferment for a living that could lead to nothing at all; a living where he could make himself felt for a living where there was nobody to feel him.

And, having done it, he was profoundly sorry for himself.

So far as Mr. Cartaret could see there had been nothing else to do.  If it had all to be done over again, he told himself that he would do it.

But there Mr. Cartaret was wrong.  He couldn’t have done it or anything like it twice.  It was one of those deeds, supremeful sacrificial, that strain a man’s moral energies to breaking point and render him incapable of further sacrifice; if, indeed, it did not render further sacrifice superfluous.  Mr. Cartaret honestly felt that even an exacting deity could require no more of him.

And it wasn’t the first time either, nor his daughter Alice the first woman who had come between the Vicar and his prospects.  Looking back he saw himself driven from pillar to post, from parish to parish, by the folly or incompetence of his womankind.

Strictly speaking, it was his first wife, Mary Gwendolen, the one the children called Mother, who had begun it.  She had made his first parish unendurable to him by dying in it.  This she had done when Alice was born, thereby making Alice unendurable to him, too.  Poor Mamie!  He always thought of her as having, inscrutably, failed him.

All three of them had failed him.

His second wife, Frances, the one the children called Mamma (the Vicar had made himself believe that he had married her solely on their account), had turned into a nervous invalid on his hands before she died of that obscure internal trouble which he had so wisely and patiently ignored.

His third wife, Robina (the one they called Mummy), had run away from him in the fifth year of their marriage.  When she implored him to divorce her he said that, whatever her conduct had been, that course was impossible to him as a churchman, as she well knew; but that he forgave her.  He had made himself believe it.