I felt her hand trembling under mine, but I had not the courage to look at her.  I heard her call my name again a little cry, the very poignancy of pity and distress.  It almost unnerved me.

“I knew that you loved her, Hugh,” she said.  “It was only—­only a little while after you married me that I found it out.  I guessed it—­women do guess such things—­long before you realized it yourself.  You ought to have married her instead of me.  You would have been happier with her.”

I did not answer.

“I, too, have thought a great deal,” she went on, after a moment.  “I began earlier than you, I had to.”  I looked up suddenly and saw her smiling at me, faintly, through her tears.  “But I’ve been thinking more, and learning more since I’ve been over here.  I’ve come to see that that our failure hasn’t been as much your fault as I once thought, as much as you yourself declare.  You have done me a wrong, and you’ve done the children a wrong.  Oh, it is frightful to think how little I knew when I married you, but even then I felt instinctively that you didn’t love me as I deserved to be loved.  And when we came back from Europe I knew that I couldn’t satisfy you, I couldn’t look upon life as you saw it, no matter how hard I tried.  I did try, but it wasn’t any use.  You’ll never know how much I’ve suffered all these years.

“I have been happier here, away from you, with the children; I’ve had a chance to be myself.  It isn’t that I’m—­much.  It isn’t that I don’t need guidance and counsel and—­sympathy.  I’ve missed those, but you’ve never given them to me, and I’ve been learning more and more to do without them.  I don’t know why marriage should suddenly have become such a mockery and failure in our time, but I know that it is, that ours hasn’t been such an exception as I once thought.  I’ve come to believe that divorce is often justified.”

“It is justified so far as you are concerned, Maude,” I replied.  “It is not justified for me.  I have forfeited, as I say, any rights over you.  I have been the aggressor and transgressor from the start.  You have been a good wife and a good mother, you have been faithful, I have had absolutely nothing to complain of.”

“Sometimes I think I might have tried harder,” she said.  “At least I might have understood better.  I was stupid.  But everything went wrong.  And I saw you growing away from me all the time, Hugh, growing away from the friends who were fond of you, as though you were fading in the distance.  It wasn’t wholly because—­because of Nancy that I left you.  That gave me an excuse—­an excuse for myself.  Long before that I realized my helplessness, I knew that whatever I might have done was past doing.”

“Yes, I know,” I assented.

We sat in silence for a while.  The train was skirting an ancient town set on a hill, crowned with a castle and a Gothic church whose windows were afire in the setting sun.