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with her eyes open, with perfect courage and perfect integrity. At the same time I don’t think she quite realized what kind of man I was. I didn’t mean to deceive her; but she was deceived. She was very young and very ignorant and took her first love affair with a terrible whole-heartedness. I didn’t believe in whole hearts where love affairs were concerned and she never understood that. She was very ingenuous. She still is. And she is faithful to the core.’ Ingpen looked at Monica from the end of the room which he had, in his pacing, reached.

‘And, since she was faithful, why did you part? Were you faithless?’ Monica asked.

‘Yes; I was faithless, after a fashion,’ said Ingpen, still standing to look at her; seeking, not arranging, the truth. ‘But I don’t think that I am by nature disloyal, if you can accept the difference. And I can even conceive that I might have remained faithful to one woman in spite of my polygamous tendencies; because I can love very deeply. It’s only that things get broken. They break more easily in love affairs than in marriages, perhaps. A quarrel isn’t as perilous a thing in a marriage as it is in a love affair. There’s nothing to keep people together in a love affair—except love; and that may seem extinguished.—Well. Yes. I was faithless,’ he re-