“Cleanse me and intercede for me, O Mother of my God.”

It was as though our Blessed Lady did so, for as I walked out of the church and down the broad steps in front of it, I had a feeling of purity and lightness that I had never known since my time at the Sacred Heart.

It was a beautiful day, with all the freshness and fragrance of early morning in summer, when the white stone houses of Paris seem to blush in the sunrise; and as I walked up the Champs Elysees on my way back to the hotel, I met under the chestnut trees, which were then in bloom, a little company of young girls returning to school after their first communion.

How sweet they looked!  In their white muslin frocks, white shoes and stockings and gloves, white veils and coronets of white flowers, they were twittering away as merrily as the little birds that were singing unseen in the leaves above them.

It made me feel like a child myself to look at their sweet faces; but turning into the hotel I felt like a woman too, for I thought the great and holy mystery, the sacrament of union and love, had given me such strength that I could meet any further wrong I might have to endure in my walk through the world with charity and forgiveness.

But how little a woman knows of her heart until it is tried in the fires of passion!

As I entered the salon which (as usual) divided my husband’s bedroom from mine, I came upon my maid, Price, listening intently at my husband’s closed door.  This seemed to me so improper that I was beginning to reprove her, when she put her finger to her lip and coming over to me with her black eyes ablaze she said: 

“I know you will pack me off for what I’m going to say, yet I can’t help that.  You’ve stood too much already, my lady, but if you are a woman and have any pride in yourself as a wife, go and listen at that door and see if you can stand any more.”

With that she went out of the salon, and I tried to go to my own room, but I could not stir.  Something held me to the spot on which I stood, and I found myself listening to the voices which I could distinctly hear in my husband’s bedroom.

There were two voices, one a man’s, loud and reckless, the other a woman’s soft and cautious.

There was no need to tell myself whose voices they were, and neither did I ask myself any questions.  I did not put to my mind the pros and cons of the case for myself or the case for my husband.  I only thought and felt and behaved as any other wife would think and feel and behave at such a moment.  An ugly and depraved thing, which my pride or my self-respect had never hitherto permitted me to believe in, suddenly leapt into life.

I was outraged.  I was a victim of the treachery, the duplicity, the disloyalty, and the smothered secrecy of husband and friend.

My heart and soul were aflame with a sense of wrong.  All the sweetening and softening and purifying effects of the sacrament were gone in an instant, and, moving stealthily across the carpet towards my husband’s door, I swiftly turned the handle.