I could not help but notice that a jarring something was in her tone. But I paid no heed to it. My thoughts were elsewhere. "How wrong it is," I murmured, "for people to scoff at love. They cannot know what love is--as I do." "Perhaps not. I should think that what you don't know about love, May, isn't worth knowing." I sighed. "I fancy, Lily dear, that I have heard stories about you." "I daresay; but I never snapped up your favourite cousin from under your nose. Possibly you will not mind telling me if you do mean to marry one of them, and, if so, which." "Lily! How can you ask me such a question? Have I not just been telling you that there is only one man in the world for me, henceforth and for ever, and that his name is Charlie?" "Exactly. Only last week you told me precisely the same story, and his name was Jim, while about a fortnight ago, it was Norman." My dearest mamma, you see I am making a clean breast of everything to you. I own, quite candidly, that since I have been here I have not behaved precisely as I might have done, and, indeed, ought to have done. I do not know how it is, I meant to be good; I am sure that nothing could have been better than my resolutions. I had no idea that they could have been so easily broken. It only shows, after all, how fragile we are. I felt that, strange and sad though it seems, Lily was not wholly unjust. I got up from my chair, and I knelt at her feet, and I pillowed my head in her lap and I cried: "Oh, Lily, I've been so wicked! You can't think how sorry I am, now that it's too late. I wish you'd help me, and tell me what I ought to do." "I'm a bit of a dab at a cry myself," she said. "So, if you take my advice, to begin with, you'll literally dry up." Was it not unkind? And was it not vulgar? But I sometimes think that Lily's heart is like the nether millstone--so hard, you know. She went on: "If you do mean business with Charlie, and you do want my advice, you'll just tell him everything you have been doing, and leave the solution of the situation to him." I made up my mind there and then that that was exactly what I would do. I resolved that I would have no secrets from my husband--particularly as he would be sure to be told them by unfriendly lips if he did not learn them from mine. Besides, in such matters, a man is so much more generous, and so much more sympathetic than a woman--especially the man. Nor does he value you any the less because he finds that someone else happens to value you a little too.