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‘The excitement has been too much for you,’ Munden remarked.

Shergold looked at him, with a painful embarrassment in his features; then suddenly he bent forward.

‘Munden, it’s I who have lied. I did ask that girl to marry me.’

‘When?’

‘Last night.’

‘Why?’

‘Because for a moment I was insane.’ They stared at each other.

‘Has she any hold upon you?’ Munden asked slowly.

‘None whatever, except this frantic offer of mine.’

‘Into which she inveigled you?’

‘I can’t honestly say she did; it was entirely my own fault. She has never behaved loosely, or even like a schemer. I doubt whether she knew anything about my uncle, until I told her last night.’

He spoke rapidly, in a thick voice, moving his arms in helpless protestation. His look was one of unutterable misery.

‘Well,’ observed Munden, ‘the frenzy has at all events passed. You have the common-sense to treat it as if it had never been; and really I am tempted to believe that it was literal lunacy. Last night were you drunk?’

‘I had drunk nothing. Listen, and I will tell you all about it. I am a fool about women. I don’t know what it is–certainly not a sensual or passionate nature; mine is nothing of the sort. It’s sheer sentimentality, I suppose. I can’t be friendly with a woman without drifting into mawkish tenderness–there’s the simple truth. If I had married happily, I don’t think I should have been tempted to go about philandering. The society of a wife I loved and respected would be sufficient. But there’s that need in me–the incessant hunger for a woman’s sympathy and affection. Such a hideous mistake as mine when I married would have made a cynic of most men; upon me the lesson has been utterly thrown away. I mean that, though I can talk of women rationally enough with a friend, I am at their mercy when alone with them–at the mercy of the silliest, vulgarest creature. After all, isn’t it very much the same with men in general? The average man–how does he come to marry? Do you think he deliberately selects? Does he fall in love, in the strict sense of the phrase, with that one particular girl? No; it comes about by chance–by the drifting force of circumstances. Not one man in ten thousand, when he thinks of marriage, waits for the ideal wife–for the woman who makes capture of his soul or even of his senses. Men marry without passion. Most of us have a very small circle for choice; the hazard of everyday life throws us into contact with this girl or that, and presently we begin to feel either that we have compromised ourselves, or that we might as well save trouble and settle down as soon as possible, and the girl at hand will do as well as another. More often than not it is the girl who decides for us. In more than half the marriages it’s the woman who has practically proposed. She puts herself in a man’s way. With her it rests almost entirely whether a man shall think of her as a possible wife or not. She has endless ways of putting herself forward without seeming to do so. As often as not, it’s mere passivity that effects the end. She has only to remain seated instead of moving away; to listen with a smile instead of looking bored; to be at home instead of being out,–and she is making love to a man. In a Palace of Truth how many husbands would have to confess that it decidedly surprised them when they found themselves engaged to be married? The will comes into play only for a moment or two now and then. Of course it is made to seem responsible, and in a sense it is responsible, but, in the vast majority of cases, purely as an animal instinct, confirming the suggestion of circumstances.’

‘There’s something in all this,’ granted the listener, ‘but it doesn’t explain the behaviour of a man who, after frightful experience in marriage–after recovering his freedom–after finding himself welcomed by congenial society–after inheriting a fortune to use as he likes–goes and offers himself to an artful hussy in a lodging-house.’