And, if one doesn't know as much as that about the first thing in the world, what does one know and why is one here?

I asked Mrs Ashburnham whether she had told Florence that and what Florence had said and she answered:--"Florence didn't offer any comment at al . What could she say?

There wasn't anything to be said. With the grinding poverty we had to put up with to keep up appearances, and the way the poverty came about--you know what I mean--any woman would have been justified in taking a lover and presents too. Florence once said about a very similar position--she was a little too wel -bred, too American, to talk about mine--that it was a case of perfectly open riding and the woman could just act on the spur of the moment. She said it in American of course, but that was the sense of it. I think her actual words were: 'That it was up to her to take it or leave it. . . .'" I don't want you to think that I am writing Teddy Ashburnham down a brute. I don't believe he was. God I

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knows, perhaps al men are like that. For as I've said what do I know even of the smoking-room? Fel ows come in and tel the most extraordinarily gross stories--so gross that they wil positively give you a pain. And yet they'd be offended if you suggested that they weren't the sort of person you could trust your wife alone with. And very likely they'd be quite properly offended--that is if you can trust anybody alone with anybody. But that sort of fel ow obviously takes more delight in listening to or in tel ing gross stories--more delight than in anything else in the world. They'l hunt languidly and dress languidly and dine languidly and work without enthusiasm and find it a bore to carry on three minutes'

conversation about anything whatever and yet, when the other sort of conversation begins, they'l laugh. and wake up and throw themselves about in their chairs. Then, if they so delight in the narration, how is it possible that they can be offended--and properly offended--at the suggestion that they might make attempts upon your wife's honour? Or again: Edward Ashburnham was the cleanest looking sort of chap;--an excel ent magistrate, a first rate soldier, one of the best landlords, so they said, in Hampshire, England. To the poor and to hopeless drunkards, as I myself have witnessed, he was like a painstaking guardian. And he never told a story that couldn't have gone into the columns of the Field more than once or twice in al the nine years of my knowing him. He didn't even like hearing them; he would fidget and get up and go out to buy a cigar or something of that sort. You would have said that he was just exactly the sort of chap that you could have trusted your wife with. And I trusted mine and it was madness. And yet again you have me. If poor Edward was dangerous because of the chastity of his expressions--and they say that is always the hal -mark of a libertine--what about myself?

For I solemnly avow that not only have I never so much as hinted at an impropriety in my conversation in the whole of my days; and more than that, I wil vouch for the cleanness of my thoughts and the absolute chastity of my life. At what, then, does it al work out? Is the whole thing a fol y and a mockery? Am I no better than a eunuch or is the proper man--the man with the right to existence--a raging stal ion forever neighing after his neighbour's womankind?

I don't know. And there is nothing to guide us. And if everything is so nebulous about a matter so elementary as the morals of sex, what is there to guide us in the more subtle morality of al other personal contacts, associations, and activities? Or are we meant to act on impulse alone? It is al a darkness. I

I DON'T know how it is best to put this thing down--whether it would be better to try and tel the story from the beginning, as if it were a story; or whether to tel it from this distance of time, as it reached me from the lips of Leonora or from those of Edward himself. So I shal just imagine myself for a fortnight or so at one side of the fireplace of a country cottage, with a sympathetic soul opposite me.