And, following this he wrote her: "I am inexpressibly sorry to cause you any new annoyance and to arouse once more your just impatience and resentment. But I see no use in a recapitulation of my shortcomings and of your own many disappointments in the man you married. "Please remember that I have always assumed all blame for our marriage; and that I shall always charge myself with it. I have no reply to make to your reproaches,--no defence; I was not in love with you when I married you--which is as serious an offence as any man can perpetrate toward any woman. And I do not now blame you for a very natural refusal to tolerate anything approaching the sympathy and intimacy that ought to exist between husband and wife. "I did entertain a hazy idea that affection and perhaps love might be ultimately possible even under the circumstances of such a marriage as ours; and in a youthful, ignorant, and inexperienced way I attempted to bring it about. My notions of our mutual obligations were very vague and indefinite. "Please believe I did not realise how utterly distasteful any such ideas were to you, and how deep was your personal disinclination for the man you married. "I understand now how many mistakes I made before I finally rid you of myself, and gave you a chance to live your life in your own way unharassed by the interference of a young, ignorant, and probably aggressive man. "Your aversion to motherhood was, after all, your own affair. Man has no right to demand that of woman. I took a very bullying and intolerant attitude toward you--not, as I now realise, from any real conviction on the subject, but because I liked and wanted children, and also because I was influenced by the cant of the hour--the fashion being to demand of woman, on ethical grounds, quantitative reproduction as a marriage offering to the Almighty. As though indiscriminate and wholesale addition to humanity were an admirable and religious duty. Nothing, even in the Old Testament, is more stupid than such a doctrine; no child should ever be born unwelcome to both parents. "I am sorry I could not find your circle of friends interesting. I sometimes think I might have, had you and I been mutually sympathetic. But the situation was impossible; our ideas, interests, convictions, tastes, were radically at variance; we had absolutely nothing in common to build on. What marriage ties could endure the strain of such conditions? The fault was mine, Winifred; I am sorry for you. "I don't know much about anything, but, thinking as clearly and as impersonally as it is in me to think, I begin to believe that divorce, far from deserving the stigma attached to it, is a step forward in civilisation.