"No, I won't. The rumours have included her, of course. But what those rumours hint, Clydesdale, is an absolute lie. I blame myself in a measure; I should not have come here so often—should not have continued to see Elena so informally. I was in love with her once; I did ask her to marry me. She took you. Try to believe me, Clydesdale, when I tell you that though for me there did still linger about her that inexplicable charm which attracted me, which makes your wife so attractive to everybody, never for a moment did it occur to me not to acquiesce in the finality of her choice. Never did I meditate any wrong toward you or toward her. I did dangle. That was where I blame myself. Because where a better man might have done it uncriticised, I was, it seems, open to suspicion."
"You're no worse than the next," said Clydesdale in a deep growl. "Hell's bells! I don't blame you! And there would have been nothing to it anyway if Elena had not lost her head that night and bolted. I was rough with you all right; but you behaved handsomely; and I knew where the trouble was. Because, Desboro, my wife dislikes me."
"I thought——"
"No! Let's have the truth, damn it! That's the truth! My wife dislikes me. It may be that she is crazy about you; I don't know. But I am inclined to think—after these months of hell, Desboro—that she really is not crazy about you, or about any man; that it is only her dislike of me that possesses her to—to deal with me as she has done."
He was still grinning, but his heavy lower lip twitched, and suddenly the horror of it broke on Desboro—that this great, gross, red-faced creature was suffering in every atom of his unwieldy bulk; that the fixed grin was covering anguish; that the man's heart was breaking there, now, where he sat, the rictus mortis stamped on his quivering face.
"Clydesdale," he said, unsteadily, "I came here meaning to say only what I have said—that you never had anything to doubt in me—but that rumours still coupled my name with Elena's. That was all I meant to say. But I'll say more. I'm sorry that things are not going well with you and Elena. I would do anything in the world that lay within my power to help make yours a happy marriage. But—marriages all seem to go wrong. For years—witnessing what I have—what everybody among our sort of people cannot choose but witness—I made up my mind that marriage was no good."
He passed his hand slowly over his eyes; waited a moment, then:
"But I was wrong. That's what the matter is—that is how the matter lies between the sort of people we are and marriage. It is we who are wrong; there's nothing wrong about marriage, absolutely nothing. Only many of us are not fit for it. And some of us take it as a preventive, as a moral medicine—as though anybody could endure an eternal dosing! And some of us seek it as a refuge—a refuge from every ill, every discomfort, every annoyance and apprehension that assails the human race—as though the institution of marriage were a vast and fortified storehouse in which everything we have ever lacked and desired were lying about loose for us to pick up and pocket."