“Look here, Mrs. Majendie.  Poor Walter always said you were much too good for him.  If you’ll pardon my saying so, I never believed that until now.  Now, upon my soul, I do believe it.  And I believe that’s where the trouble’s been all along.  There are things about a man that a woman like you cannot understand.  She doesn’t try to understand them.  She doesn’t want to.  She’d die rather than know.  So—­well—­the whole thing’s wrapped up in mystery, and she thinks it’s something awful and iniquitous, something incomprehensible.”

“Yes.  If she thinks about it at all.”

“My dear lady, very often she thinks about it a great deal more than is good for her, and she thinks wrong.  She’s bound to, being what she is.  Now, when an ordinary man marries that sort of woman there’s certain to be trouble.”

He paused, pondering.  “My wife’s a dear, good, little woman,” he said presently; “she’s the best little woman in the world for me; but I dare say to outsiders, she’s a very ordinary little woman.  Well, you know, I don’t call myself a remarkably good man, even now, and I wasn’t a good man at all before she married me.  D’you mind my talking about myself like this?”

“No.”  She tried to keep herself sincere.  “No.  I don’t think I do.”

“You do, I’m afraid.  I don’t much like it myself.  But, you see, I’m trying to help you.  You said you wanted to understand, didn’t you?”

“Yes.  I want to understand.”

“Well, then, I’m not a good man, and your husband is.  And yet, I’d no more think of leaving my dear little wife for another woman than I would of committing a murder.  But, if she’d been ‘too good’ for me, there’s no knowing what I mightn’t have done.  D’you see?”

“I see.  You’re trying to tell me that it was my fault that my husband left me.”

“Your fault?  No.  It was hardly your fault, Mrs. Majendie.”

He meditated.  “There’s another thing.  You good women are apt to run away with the idea that—­that this sort of thing is so tremendously important to us.  It isn’t.  It isn’t.”

“Then why behave as if it were?”

“We don’t.  That’s your mistake.  Ten to one, when a man’s once married and happy, he doesn’t think about it at all.  Of course, if he isn’t happy—­but, even then, he doesn’t go thinking about it all day long.  The ordinary man doesn’t.  He’s got other things to attend to—­his business, his profession, his religion, anything you like.  Those are the important things, the things he thinks about, the things that take up his time.”

“I see.  I see.  The woman doesn’t count.”

“Of course she counts.  But she counts in another way.  Bless you, the woman may be his religion, his superstition.  In your husband’s case it certainly was so.”

Her face quivered.

“Of course,” he said, “what beats you is—­how a man can love his wife with his whole heart and soul, and yet be unfaithful to her.”