“I swear to heaven that my lowest cynical ideas of women, and the loathing with which their simply animal vagaries inspires a thoughtful man, are distanced and made to seem a benevolent criticism, by the actualities of my experience.  I say that you cannot put faith in a woman.  Even now, I do not—­it’s against reason—­I do not believe that she—­this Dahlia—­means to go through with it.  She is trying me.  I have told her that she was my wife.  Her self-respect—­everything that keeps a woman’s head up—­must have induced her to think so.  Why, she is not a fool!  How can she mean to give herself to an ignorant country donkey?  She does not:  mark me.  For her, who is a really—­I may say, the most refined nature I have ever met, to affect this, and think of deceiving me, does not do credit to her wits—­and she is not without her share.

“I did once mean that she should be honourably allied to me.  It’s comforting that the act is not the wife of the intention, or I should now be yoked to a mere thing of the seasons and the hours—­a creature whose ‘No’ to-day is the ‘Yes’ of to-morrow.  Women of this cast are sure to end comfortably for themselves, they are so obedient to the whips of Providence.

“But I tell you candidly, Algy, I believe she’s pushing me, that she may see how far I will let her go.  I do not permit her to play at this game with me.”  The difficulty is in teaching women that we are not constituted as they are, and that we are wilfully earnest, while they, who never can be so save under compulsion, carry it on with us, expecting that at a certain crisis a curtain will drop, and we shall take a deep breath, join hands, and exclaim, ’What an exciting play!’—­weeping luxuriously.  The actualities of life must be branded on their backs—­you can’t get their brains to apprehend them.

“Poor things! they need pity.  I am ready to confess I did not keep my promise to her.  I am very sorry she has been ill.  Of course, having no brains—­nothing but sensations wherewith to combat every new revolution of fortune, she can’t but fall ill.  But I think of her; and I wish to God I did not.  She is going to enter her own sphere—­though, mark me, it will turn out as I say, that, when it comes to the crisis, there will be shrieks and astonishment that the curtain doesn’t fall and the whole resolve itself to what they call a dream in our language, a farce.

“I am astonished that there should be no letters for me.  I can understand her not writing at first; but apparently she cherishes rancour.  It is not like her.  I can’t help thinking there must be one letter from her, and that you keep it back.  I remember that I told you when I left England I desired to have no letter forwarded to me, but I have repeatedly asked you since if there was a letter, and it appears to me that you have shuffled in your answer.  I merely wish to know if there is a letter;