“Wouldn’t he suspect that you were jealous then?” said Hermione. “And you wouldn’t talk to another man about your wife, would you? I come back to my first view—you do mother an injustice. If you would talk to her about herself in a cordial and sympathetic way—and it ought to be very easy to be at least as sympathetic and cordial as Orestes was when he went—you would be sensible of her appeal, quite apart from the sort of charm that causes you to be jealous. Don’t waste time talking to Orestes—talk to her. Last night, when he happened to be on the subject, Orestes made a wise remark, I thought; he said he imagined that some married people have never exchanged ideas with each other to the same extent as with their casual neighbours, because most marriages begin irrationally, in passion, and since there’s no connection between passion and intelligence, when the passion fades they don’t know how to proceed to the other form of discourse. I thought that was clever, don’t you? It made me glad that he and I came together through—well, you might call it conviction, rather than a less worthy kind of attraction.”