It had been "the one night of her lover's life"; but he went back to that "wonderful woman," his wife, who had "as big a heart as all this stretch of acres and that breadth of sea." To Mary, he wrote, "I blame myself utterly and I blame myself alone. . . . So many another woman would have reckoned the cost before she knew the full account. You said nothing. _You are wonderful, Mary_, and if any woman deserves to escape the consequences of passion, it is you." "God!" she cried, "was that the little mind her own had met with? . . . She knew how in the deepest recesses of her soul there did not live a father to her child. . . . If this was a man, then men were nothing to women. Two nights of burning passion he had been with her and for those moments they had been inseparably one. But now he had gone as though the whole world divided them. . . . With that letter he had cancelled all existence in the meaning of life. There was no meaning in him." He was "the mere servant of Nature, whipped with passion to her purpose . . . no father at all." Wherefore _she tries to explain_ to him: "Women are not complicated. It is only the laws that make us appear so. . . . That first of our two nights on the cliffs, did you find me complicated or difficult of understanding? I showed, as well as gave you myself, and this is how you have treated that revelation. . . . _Why do you hint about shame to me? Did you think I shared what you call your weakness? Did you think for those moments that, as you say of yourself, I forgot or lost restraint?_ . . . You would not believe me if I told you that all women in their essence are the same. It is only with so many that . . . the hollow dignity of social position, the chimera of good repute . . . are more attractive and alluring than the pain and discomfort and difficulty of bringing children into a competitive world. . . . But starve one of these women . . . deny to her the first function which justifies her existence . . . and you will find her behave as I behaved. . . . I had no shame then. I loved. Loving no longer, I still now have no shame because, and believe me it is not in anger, we have no cause to meet again."