“Oh, it was then he decided not to kill you? Poor man! … Helen, you’re impossible!”

“Why impossible, Charitas? Obvious and innocent, I think,” said Helen. “Far more moral, I claim, than the world in which I have tried to lead a good life. If you had had my experience, and had grown used as I have to the odd turns things take, you’d either say that our ideas of justice have no basis in experience, or else that our misfortunes are the work of powers above us, who use us for their own purposes. Love, for instance. You’d better lift up your hands to it. It’s terrible as well as beautiful. It isn’t what you think it is, Charitas—it isn’t just a word for a feeling we have.”

“I haven’t gone into the subject so deeply as you have,” said Charitas. “No doubt you’ve talked this over many a time with Paris. You haven’t said much about Paris.”

“I loved him,” said Helen, “and he is dead. What would you like me to say about him?”

“You don’t mind my asking, do you?” said Charitas. “I wondered how he fitted into your philosophy. You loved him enough to run away with him, but now that he is dead you seem rather tranquil about it. Helen, it does make you seem hard-hearted; you ought to appear sad, anyway.”

“If I tell you the truth, you’ll not understand me,” said Helen, “but the truth is, it wasn’t Paris I loved; I loved something he made me think of. At first I thought I loved him—afterwards I loved, and always shall, what I thought was Paris. First I loved him, then I was sorry for him.”

“That’s what I have against romance,” said Charitas, “the disillusion afterwards.”

“Ah, you’ve heard of it?” asked Helen.

“Yes,” said Charitas, “and in your case the disillusion must have made you feel it was an unusually bad mistake. That’s why I can’t see much in your philosophy of innocence, Helen.”

“If that illusion was a bad mistake, Charitas, then most marriages are a fatal error. Please understand why I was sorry for Paris; I felt that he too was lost in a madness, lost for something not me, for something I made him dream of, something he would never find—lost as I was lost. But it happens in marriage too, if you begin with love. Many a good husband is a lost man. When it comes to that, Charitas, how about the wives? Isn’t it my turn to ask how your own heart has weathered the years?”

“I don’t think I could speak of anything so intimate, Helen, not even to you. Besides, I’ve nothing to tell. My husband and I have been entirely faithful to each other.”

“But might not be,” said Helen, “if there were a beautiful serving-girl in the house. As for yourself, Charitas, do you mean you are still in the heyday of amorous illusion, or do you feel virtuous because you have always managed to care for other men a little less, even, than you have cared for your husband?”