You see, I am apt to side with the miserable fellow who made a false step--foolish, if you like--all for love of a selfish and beautiful woman." "She was beautiful ?" "Yes, as you are." She did not blush at that rank compliment, any more than a lioness would, if you praised the astonishing sleekness and beauty of its skin.
"And she had been a true wife to him before that ?" "Yes, in all that concerned the code." "Well ?--Well, was not that enough?
She did what she could, as long as she could." She leaned far back in the chair, her eyes half shut.
"Don't you think--as a woman, not as a theorist--that Mrs.Anson might at least have come to him when he was dying ?" "It would only have been uncomfortable for her.

She had no part in his life; she could not feel with him.

She could do nothing." "But suppose she had loved him?
By that memory, then, of the time when they took each other for better or for worse, until death should part them ?" "Death did part them when the code banished him; when he passed from a free world into a cage.

Besides, we are talking about people marrying, not about their loving." "I will admit," I said, with a little raw irony, "that I was not exact in definition." Here I got a glimpse into her nature which rendered after events not so marvellous to me as they might seem to others.

She thought a moment quite indolently, and then continued: "You make one moralise like George Eliot.