I did not reply, and after another moment he said: 

“But perhaps you wish me to understand that this man whom I was so foolish as to invite to my house abused my hospitality and betrayed my wife.  Is that what you mean?”

“No,” I said.  “He observed the laws of hospitality much better than you did, and if I am betrayed I betrayed myself.”

I shall never forget the look with which my husband received this confession.  He drew himself up with the air of an injured man and said: 

“What?  You mean that you yourself . . . deliberately . . .  Good God!”

He stopped for a moment and then said with a rush: 

“I suppose you’ve not forgotten what happened at the time of our marriage . . . your resistance and the ridiculous compact I submitted to?  Why did I submit?  Because I thought your innocence, your convent-bred ideas, and your ignorance of the first conditions of matrimony. . . .  But I’ve been fooled, for you now tell me . . . after all my complacency . . . that you have deliberately. . . .  In the name of God do you know what you are?  There’s only one name for a woman who does what you’ve done.  Do you want me to tell you what that name is?”

I was quivering with shame, but my mind, which was going at lightning speed, was thinking of London, of Cairo, of Rome, and of Paris.

“Why don’t you speak?” he cried, lifting his voice in his rage.  “Don’t you understand what a letter like this is calling you?”

My heart choked.  But the thought that came to me—­that, bad as his own life had been, he considered he had a right to treat me in this way because he was a man and I was a woman—­brought strength out of my weakness, so that when he went on to curse my Church and my religion, saying this was all that had come of “the mummery of my masses,” I fired up for a moment and said: 

“You can spare yourself these blasphemies.  If I have done wrong, it is I, and not my Church, that is to blame for it.”

“If you have done wrong!” he cried.  “Damn it, have you lost all sense of a woman’s duty to her husband?  While you have been married to me and I have been fool enough not to claim you as a wife because I thought you were only fit company for the saints and angels, you have been prostituting yourself to this blusterer, this . . .”

“That is a lie,” I said, stepping up to him in the middle of the floor.  “It’s true that I am married to you, but he is my real husband and you . . . you are nothing to me at all.”

My husband stood for a moment with his mouth agape.  Then he began to laugh—­loudly, derisively, mockingly.

“Nothing to you, am I?  You don’t mind bearing my name, though, and when your time comes you’ll expect it to cover your disgrace.”

His face had become shockingly distorted.  He was quivering with fury.

“That’s not the worst, either,” he cried.  “It’s not enough that you should tell me to my face that somebody else is your real husband, but you must shunt your spurious offspring into my house.  Isn’t that what it all comes to . . . all this damnable fuss of your father’s . . . that you are going to palm off on me and my name and family your own and this man’s . . . bastard?”