There is practically no conversation; the whole novel is a monologue, a going forward or a harking back to unravel intricate motives and to lay bare the souls of men and women.
Florence, the wife of the narrator, had apparently always been a harlot at heart, but had successfully hoodwinked him for years. Leonora, the betrayed wife of the good soldier, adored her husband with a passion that was like an agony, and hated him with an agony that was as bitter as the sea.
Florence one day had laid one finger on Captain Ashburnham's wrist. "I was aware of something treacherous, something frightful, something evil in the day.... In Ashburnham's face I knew that there was absolute panic.... 'I can't stand this,' said Leonora, with a most extraordinary passion. 'I must get out of this.' I was horribly frightened.... 'Don't you see,' she said, 'don't you see what's going on?... Don't you see that that's the cause of the whole miserable affair; of the whole sorrow of the world? And of the eternal damnation of you and me and them?' Her eyes were enormously distended; her face was exactly that of a person looking into the pit of hell and seeing horrors there." But he sees nothing. In Florence he thought he had a wife and an unattained mistress—and in the retaining of her in the world (she pretended to have serious heart trouble) he had his occupation, career and ambition.
Ashburnham had begun his intrigues by being arrested for kissing a servant girl in a train. He left servants alone after that and ran amok with girls of his own class. There was Mrs Maidan, who died—of heart trouble, at twenty-three. Florence had come upon Leonora boxing Mrs Maidan's ears.... There had been an affair with a harpy mistress of a Russian Grand Duke, who exacted a twenty-thousand-pound pearl tiara from Edward as the price of her favours for a week. It was not that he was a promiscuous libertine: he was a sentimentalist.
We find it hard to realise all through this rambling discourse that until Edward and the last girl concerned and Florence were all dead the narrator had not the shadow of a suspicion that there was anything wrong. "I suppose that during all that time I was a deceived husband and that Leonora was pimping for Edward.... You ask how it feels to be a deceived husband.... It is not Hell, certainly it is not necessarily Heaven.... I hate Florence. I hate Florence with such a hatred that I would not spare her an eternity of loneliness ... she cut out poor dear Edward from sheer vanity; she meddled between him and Leonora from a sheer, imbecile spirit of district visiting. Do you understand that, whilst she was Edward's mistress, she was perpetually trying to reunite him to his wife?... Once she said to Florence in the early morning: 'You come to me straight out of his bed to tell me that that is my proper place. I know it, thank you.... Yes, you would give him up. And you would go on writing to each other in secret, and committing adultery in hired rooms. I know the pair of you, you know. No. I prefer the situation as it is.'"
Mrs Maidan had died on the 4th of August 1904 and then nothing happened until the 4th of August 1913. It was on the 4th of August 1901 that the narrator had married Florence, who had then hinted that she did not want much physical passion from her husband. She elaborated rules so that she should never be caught. "I must never enter her room without knocking, or her poor little heart might flutter away to its doom." Her first lover, Jimmy, she discarded for Edward as soon as he appeared on the scene. It was because she was afraid that her husband would murder her that she took such precautions.
"Well, there you have the position ... the husband an ignorant fool, the wife a cold sensualist with imbecile fears ... and the blackmailing lover ... and then ... Edward Ashburnham, who was worth having." But within three years he was sick of Florence and would willingly have let the husband see what his wife was like, but Leonora threatened to wreak appalling vengeance if any inkling of the truth filtered through. The worst vengeance would have been to refuse herself ever to see him again ... but the husband discovers the truth about his wife from a stranger in an hotel.
"'Do you know who that is?' asked the stranger of me as Florence burst past. 'The last time I saw that girl she was coming out of the bedroom of a young man at five o'clock in the morning....'
"A long time afterwards I ... went up to Florence's room. She had not locked the door—for the first night of our married life. She was lying ... on her bed. She had a little phial ... in her right hand. That was on the 4th of August 1913.