“I think I’m honest, my dear Adraste, but I have no other boast. The dark fact is that I have made many people unhappy, and I shall be remembered, if Menelaus or Hermione writes my obituary, as anything but generous or just. But I have one excuse, if I need one, for having come to see life as a comedy—a rather wistful and even sad comedy; at any moment in my later years I might have had a better reputation if I had been willing to renounce my virtues. If I had pretended a love for Menelaus which I no longer had, they would have called me a model wife. The tragedy really was in losing the love, but they think it was in admitting the fact. If I had pretended to be overwhelmed with repentance when I came home, nobody would have believed me, but they would have thought I was correct. Of course I felt no repentance. My love for Paris didn’t prove to be the real thing, but it was the nearest to it I have known, and I am grateful to heaven for it. On the other hand, those who would reform me are not convincingly alive themselves, and though they have kept their reputations, they often seem to have mislaid their souls. The sorrows they say they grieve over usually don’t look like sorrows to me—mere vexations or petty disappointments. They don’t know what sorrow is! I take that back—Orestes knows. But Charitas, for example, thinks she has a sorrow because her boy wanted to choose his own wife. It’s rather funny, to call that a sorrow. And you think you are overwhelmed because your lover wasn’t a great man. I say you ought to be grateful for the love that gave you this child, and you ought to reflect on what you were spared when Damastor permitted himself to be separated from you. How awful if you had had to pretend you were happy, after he had ceased to be what he once was. You’ve had some of the real experiences, and few of us have them all. You’ve had them unalloyed. Some of us envy you. Don’t let yourself think bitterly of your moonlight hours with him, of the glamour of his kisses, of the ecstasy of his embrace. All that you felt then, was true. People who laugh at such feelings have become incapable of having them. And don’t you teach this boy that love is dangerous and he ought to be careful, or that discretion is the secret of life!”

“I’ve thought a good deal already about the sort of career I’d like him to have.”

“You would, naturally. He’s only a week old.”

“But the responsibility is frightful, Helen.”

“What responsibility is that?”

“Why, of bringing him up right.”