“Oh, I doubt if you’ll see more than a mere likeness of temperament,” Mrs. Brinkley interfered bluntly.  “All the conditions are so different.  There couldn’t be an American Lisa.  That’s the charm of these Russian tragedies.  You feel that they’re so perfectly true there, and so perfectly impossible here.  Lavretsky would simply have got himself divorced from Varvara Pavlovna, and no clergyman could have objected to marrying him to Lisa.”

“That’s what I mean by his pessimism,” said Miss Cotton.  “He leaves you no hope.  And I think that despair should never be used in a novel except for some good purpose; don’t you, Mrs. Brinkley?”

“Well,” said Mrs. Brinkley, “I was trying to think what good purpose despair could be put to, in a book or out of it.”

“I don’t think,” said Mrs. Pasmer, referring to the book in her lap, “that he leaves you altogether in despair here, unless you’d rather he’d run off with Irene than married Tatiana.”

“Oh, I certainly didn’t wish that;” said Miss Cotton, in self-defence, as if the shot had been aimed at her.

“The book ends with a marriage; there’s no denying that,” said Mrs. Brinkley, with a reserve in her tone which caused Mrs. Pasmer to continue for her—­

“And marriage means happiness—­in a book.”

“I’m not sure that it does in this case.  The time would come, after Litvinof had told Tatiana everything, when she would have to ask herself, and not once only, what sort of man it really was who was willing to break his engagement and run off with another man’s wife, and whether he could ever repent enough for it.  She could make excuses for him, and would, but at the bottom of her heart—­No, it seems to me that there, almost for the only time, Tourguenief permitted himself an amiable weakness.  All that part of the book has the air of begging the question.”

“But don’t you see,” said Miss Cotton, leaning forward in the way she had when very earnest, “that he means to show that her love is strong enough for all that?”

“But he doesn’t, because it isn’t.  Love isn’t strong enough to save people from unhappiness through each other’s faults.  Do you suppose that so many married people are unhappy in each other because they don’t love each other?  No; it’s because they do love each other that their faults are such a mutual torment.  If they were indifferent, they wouldn’t mind each other’s faults.  Perhaps that’s the reason why there are so many American divorces; if they didn’t care, like Europeans, who don’t marry for love, they could stand it.”

“Then the moral is,” said Mrs. Pasmer, at her lightest through the surrounding gravity, “that as all Americans marry for love, only Americans who have been very good ought to get married.”

“I’m not sure that the have-been goodness is enough either,” said Mrs. Brinkley, willing to push it to the absurd.  “You marry a man’s future as well as his past.”