His wife and he cared nothing for one another, but she was jealous to the last degree.  I never saw such jealousy.  It was strange that, although she almost hated him, she watched him with feline sharpness and patience, and would even have killed any woman whom she knew had won his affection.  He, on the other hand, openly avowed that marriage without love was nothing, and flaunted without the least modification the most ideal theories as to the relation between man and woman.  Not that he ever went actually wrong.  His boyish education, his natural purity, and a fear never wholly suppressed, restrained him.  He exasperated people by his impracticability, and it must be acknowledged that it is very irritating in a difficult complexity demanding the gravest consideration—­the balancing of this against that—­to hear a man suddenly propose some naked principle with which everybody is acquainted, and decide by it solely.  I came to know him through M’Kay, who had known him for years; but M’Kay at last broke out against him, and called him a stupid fool when he threw up a handsome salary and refused to serve any longer under a house which had always treated him well, because they, moving with the times, had determined to offer their customers a cheaper description of goods, which Cardinal thought was dishonest.  M’Kay said, and said truly, that many poor persons would buy these goods who could buy nothing else, and that Cardinal, before yielding to such scruples, ought to satisfy himself that, by yielding, he would not become a burden upon others less fanciful.  This was just what happened.  Cardinal could get no work again for a long time, and had to borrow money.  I was sorry; but for my part, this and other eccentricities did not disturb my confidence in him.  He was an honest, affectionate soul, and his peculiarities were a necessary result of the total chaos of a time without any moral guidance.  With no church, no philosophy, no religion, the wonder is that anybody on whom use and wont relax their hold should ever do anything more than blindly rove hither and thither, arriving at nothing.  Cardinal was adrift, like thousands and hundreds of thousands of others, and amidst the storm and pitchy darkness of the night, thousands and hundreds of thousands of voices offer us pilotage.  It spoke well for him that he did nothing worse than take a few useless phantoms on board which did him no harm, and that he held fast to his own instinct for truth and goodness.  I never let myself be annoyed by what he produced to me from his books.  All that I discarded.  Underneath all that was a solid worth which I loved, and which was mostly not vocal.  What was vocal in him was, I am bound to say, not of much value.