“Look here, Mrs. Majendie,” she said, with an air of finely ungovernable impulse, “you’re a saint.  You know no more about men than your little girl does.  I’m not a saint, I’m a woman of the world.  I think I’ve had a rather larger experience of men—­”

Mrs. Majendie cut her short.

“I do not want to hear anything about your experience.”

“Dear lady, you shan’t hear anything about it.  I was only going to tell you that, of all the men I’ve known, there’s nobody I know better than your husband.  My knowledge of him is probably a little different from yours.”

“That I can well believe.”

“You mean you think I wouldn’t know a good man if I saw one?  My experience isn’t as bad as all that.  I can tell a good woman when I see one, too.  You’re a good woman, Mrs. Majendie, and I’ve no doubt that you’ve been told I’m a bad one.  All I can say is, that Walter Majendie was a good man when I first knew him.  He was a good man when he left me and married you.  So my badness can’t have hurt him very much.  If he’s gone wrong now, it’s that goodness of yours that’s done it.”

Anne’s lips turned white, but their muscles never moved.  And the woman who watched her wondered in what circumstances Mrs. Majendie would display emotion, if she did not display it now.

“What right have you to say these things to me?”

“I’ve a right to say a good deal more.  Your husband was very fond of me.  He would have married me if his friends hadn’t come and bullied me to give him up for the good of his morals.  I loved him—­” She suggested by an adroit shrug of her shoulders that her love was a thing that Mrs. Majendie could either take for granted or ignore.  She didn’t expect her to understand it—­“And I gave him up.  I’m not a cold-blooded woman; and it was pretty hard for me.  But I did it.  And” (she faced her) “what was the good of it?  Which of us has been the best for his morals?  You or me?  He lived with me two years, and he married you, and everybody said how virtuous and proper he was.  Well, he’s been married to you for nine years, and he’s been living with another woman for the last three.”

She had not meant to say it; for (in the presence of the social sanctities) you do not say these things.  But flesh and blood are stronger than all the social sanctities; and flesh and blood had risen and claimed their old dominion over Sarah.  The unspeakable depths in her had been stirred by her vision of the things that might have been.  She was filled with a passionate hatred of the purity which had captured Majendie, and drawn him from her, and made her seem vile in his sight.  She rejoiced in her power to crush it, to confront it with the proof of its own futility.

“I do not believe it,” said Mrs. Majendie.

“Of course you don’t believe it.  You’re a good woman.”  She shook her meditative head.  “The sort of woman who can live with a man for nine years without seeing what he’s like.  If you’d understood your husband as well as I do, you’d have known that he couldn’t run his life on your lines for six months, let alone nine years.”