“I did advise you so,” said Helen, “but you ought not to have taken my advice. At least, I thought less of you for taking it. Achilles would not have been so prudent, and I’m sure Pyrrhus wouldn’t be. I advised you for your own safety—told you of danger and of possible ridicule—but what is that to a man who loves his brother, and who has the zest of life in him? I said you’d look foolish marching in with your troops, if Agamemnon and Clytemnestra had made it up. To another sort of man my argument would have suggested how welcome he and the troops would be if the quarrel were still on. No, Menelaus, you have your good points, but you can’t play the part of a strong man, and everything you say and do confirms those truths I was trying to convey to Hermione. You’ve had two crises to face—one when I went off with Paris, the other when you knew your brother was coming home to great danger. You weren’t equal to either. You had all the friends and neighbours in to help you at Troy, and now you’re relying on Orestes. You did have some excuses in the first episode, but I don’t see how you can forgive yourself now. Your brother may be in peril of his life, and at the very moment you are safe at home, hiding behind a door to hear what your wife is telling your daughter. Your wife happens to be advising the child to marry a real man if she can. You go into a rage at such transparent treachery, and threaten to lock your wife up if ever a real man comes into your home. This is the exhibition of yourself you have just made before Hermione. You have done more than I ever could to explain why my life has not been what she approves. In my heart I pity you, Menelaus; I look at you and think of the man I once loved, the character you were never willing to become. No woman could be so untrue to you as you have been to your own possibilities. Instead of being great, you have spent your days telling yourself you were, and exacting the respect you ought to have deserved. You have pursued the shadow. What I was telling Hermione should have made you go away from that door ashamed. If you had been man enough to kill me, that night in Troy, I never would have eloped with Paris. That’s the whole story of your life and mine. If it wasn’t revenge you were after, then you had no excuse for involving so many people and ruining Troy; you could have forgiven me single-handed. When I speak of strong men, it’s not physical strength alone I mean. You could have been very strong over my eloping, and yet not lifted a finger—that is, if you had been disposed to use your mind, and if you had had a strong mind. I can imagine a certain type of man, in your situation, saying boldly that he had bribed Paris to relieve him of an obnoxious wife—that he had had to pay him well—that he had gone away deliberately, to make it easy—that the furniture hadn’t been stolen, it had been thrown in. A bold statement of that sort would have ruined Paris, and I admit it would have finished me. But in that case you would have been committed to give me up for ever. You couldn’t do that, could you, Menelaus? You wanted to brand me as an outcast, and at the same time recover me for your wife. I pity you. It’s too late now to play the rough hero; you will simply remember how weak you were, and try to atone to yourself for the memory by nagging at me, by eavesdropping, by opposing my best plans for Hermione’s welfare. Whether you liked Achilles or not, can’t you be honest about him, and recognise the contrast between you two? Can’t you see that he was disinterested at Troy, until you and Agamemnon picked a quarrel with him? How clear his character is! It isn’t surprising that I admire him; the terrible thing is that you don’t.”