"Oh, so have I. But there was always a screw loose somewhere—I mean, a screw loose in what we're assuming to be the happy marriages."
"Are there any happy marriages?—permanently happy, that is?"
The response was surprisingly direct: "That's what I hoped you'd be able to tell me."
"Then you don't know, sir?"
Again the response was surprisingly direct: "I don't know, because I'm not happily married." A second later he added: "But other people may be."
So they were going to exchange secrets, after all. "But you are married, sir?" To clear the air, he felt himself obliged to add: "Happily or unhappily."
"I married a lady who had divorced her husband." In the silence that followed it seemed to Chip that he could hear the murmur of the almost soundless river below. Somehow the sound of the river was all he could think of. Quietly moving, low-voiced couples paced up and down the promenade, and from the music-pavilion in the distance came the whine and shiver of the Mattiche. "In divorce," the measured voice resumed, "there are some dangerous risks. It's a dangerous risk for a man to divorce his wife. It's a more dangerous risk for a woman to divorce her husband. But to marry a divorced husband or a divorced wife is the most dangerous risk of all."
Chip's voice was thick and dry. "May I ask, sir, on what you base your—your opinion?"
"Chiefly on the principle that, no matter how successfully the dead are buried, they may come back again as ghosts. No one can keep them from doing that."
"And—and I presume, sir, that you held this theory when you married?"