"Listen, Arthur. I must go back through the years to the time when I married your father. I was young, gay, inexperienced, and as lighthearted as a girl could be. Your father had a greatness of his own--never think that I doubt that--and when I first met him I thought him the most wonderful man in all the world. No man was ever better calculated to impress the senses of a young girl. I gave him what was almost adoration, unthinking adoration. Of course I knew that I shared only one part of his life, but what did I care? Women are usually content if men love them; they do not care to ask what kind of life the men they trust live when they are away from them. Of the nature of your father's business life I could hardly form a guess. It was not my concern, and I was happy in my ignorance until--until a day came when I had to know. "I will spare you details, Arthur. I have said enough when I say that the discovery I made was that your father's business was based on merciless chicanery and fraud. I begged him on my knees to alter it. I told him that I was willing to live anywhere, to do anything, to suffer any privation, rather than eat dishonest bread. At first he argued with me, as one might with a foolish child. He told me he was no worse than other people--all businesses were like that; he was as good as circumstances permitted; and he laughed at what he called my pretty Puritanism. Then, when he saw that I was in earnest, he grew angry. "'Haven't I given you everything you possess?' he cried. "'You shall give me no more,' I answered. 'You have taken from me much more than you gave.' "'What have I taken?' "'My belief in you, my belief in life,' I answered. And then, in my hot anger, I told him all that I had learned, and how I abhorred to live softly at the price of cruel suffering in others, and refused to profit by the wages of robbery. He turned pale at that, for he saw that I knew something which went beyond legalised dishonesty.