“You are old enough to understand how very difficult it is for elders to give themselves away to their young.  Especially when—­like your mother and myself, though I shall never think of her as anything but young—­their hearts are altogether set on him to whom they must confess.  I cannot say we are conscious of having sinned exactly—­people in real life very seldom are, I believe—­but most persons would say we had, and at all events our conduct, righteous or not, has found us out.  The truth is, my dear, we both have pasts, which it is now my task to make known to you, because they so grievously and deeply affect your future.  Many, very many years ago, as far back indeed as 1883, when she was only twenty, your mother had the great and lasting misfortune to make an unhappy marriage—­no, not with me, Jon.  Without money of her own, and with only a stepmother—­closely related to Jezebel—­she was very unhappy in her home life.  It was Fleur’s father that she married, my cousin Soames Forsyte.  He had pursued her very tenaciously and to do him justice was deeply in love with her.  Within a week she knew the fearful mistake she had made.  It was not his fault; it was her error of judgment—­her misfortune.”

So far Jolyon had kept some semblance of irony, but now his subject carried him away.

“Jon, I want to explain to you if I can—­and it’s very hard—­how it is that an unhappy marriage such as this can so easily come about.  You will of course say:  ’If she didn’t really love him how could she ever have married him?’ You would be right if it were not for one or two rather terrible considerations.  From this initial mistake of hers all the subsequent trouble, sorrow, and tragedy have come, and so I must make it clear to you if I can.  You see, Jon, in those days and even to this day—­indeed, I don’t see, for all the talk of enlightenment, how it can well be otherwise—­most girls are married ignorant of the sexual side of life.  Even if they know what it means they have not experienced it.  That’s the crux.  It is this actual lack of experience, whatever verbal knowledge they have, which makes all the difference and all the trouble.  In a vast number of marriages-and your mother’s was one—­girls are not and cannot be certain whether they love the man they marry or not; they do not know until after that act of union which makes the reality of marriage.  Now, in many, perhaps in most doubtful cases, this act cements and strengthens the attachment, but in other cases, and your mother’s was one, it is a revelation of mistake, a destruction of such attraction as there was.  There is nothing more tragic in a woman’s life than such a revelation, growing daily, nightly clearer.  Coarse-grained and unthinking people are apt to laugh at such a mistake, and say, ’What a fuss about nothing!’ Narrow and self-righteous people, only capable of judging the lives of others by their own, are apt to condemn those who make this tragic error, to condemn them for life