‘No argument can help us, Geff. A woman without a tithe of my poor wife’s noble qualities but possessing even a faint sense of the ridiculous, might be reached: Dinah, never! Oh, it is the absurdity of the thing which humiliates one! A French song sung after a dinner-party ... the winning of a pair of gloves!’ said Gaston Arbuthnot bitterly. ‘And to think, out of such materials, that the jealousy of the most impracticable woman living could evolve serious tragedy!’ ‘Tragedy,’ returned Geff, ‘of which the fifth act is, as yet, unconditioned.’ Dinner was over; a meal at which Dinah had not appeared. The Arbuthnot cousins, side by side, were pacing a remote walk of the hotel garden. And Geoffrey, little by little, had made out the truth in respect of Dinah’s crowning misery. With his heart sore as a brave man’s heart could be over keen personal disappointment, Geoffrey knew that he must arbitrate between the two people who stood nearest to him on earth, and with whose lives his own, by some fantastic stroke of destiny, seemed, for good and for evil, to be interwoven. ‘I don’t believe in rash judgments, formed when the blood is hot,’ went on Gaston Arbuthnot. ‘When Dinah burst upon me with this new proposal I felt as if ten years of my youth had been taken from me. My anger was at white heat, and if I had spoken as I felt.... Well, I did not so speak. I accepted my fate with a decent show of self-command. Reviewing the position--yes, and remembering every word you have been saying, Geff--I believe it may be best for my poor Dinah to leave me, on probation. Let her stay for a couple of months with her people in Devonshire, see how things go on, and----’ ‘They will go on vilely! They will go from bad to worse.’ Geoffrey was in no humour for putting ornamental polish on his words. ‘When does good come from a tentative separation between man and wife?’ ‘Exactly what I said to Dinah. These little imitation divorces, I told her, are risky experiments. Impossible to make her hear me.’ ‘Your eloquence must have been at fault. You have had perfect happiness, Gaston--there is the truth! You have had such a lot as does not fall to one man in a million, and you have grown careless of it.’ Geoffrey’s voice was set in a lower key than usual. Glancing round at him, Gaston surprised an expression on the strong features, a glow in the dark eyes that he remembered. Not wholly unlike this did Geff look on the late June evening when he came, four years ago, to his rooms in Jesus, and congratulated him, Gaston, on his engagement to Dinah Thurston. ‘You have always been Dinah’s friend. I thank God she will have you for her friend in the future. Towards myself, perhaps, you are a little less than kind. Some French proverb explains to us, does it not, how a man’s friendship can never be perfectly equal for a husband and for his wife?’