For a minute, as Mary spoke, something caught hold of me, and I passed through one of those vivid moments of almost intolerable intuition in which one lives imaginatively through the profound emotional experience of another. The compensatory reaction followed, as it always does. “Even if the quality of which you speak were really there, in the link between those two people--and I’m inclined, too, to think that it _was_ there--haven’t you ever wondered what would have become of them--of their love itself, if Bill had lived? Everything was against them--everything was there to divide them--difference of age, class, traditions, outlook. Those things are bound to count in the long run. Can you see Bill and Diamond Harter together in twenty--even in ten years’ time?” “I don’t think they’d have been together,” said Mary quietly. “As it happened, the thing was arbitrarily settled for them--but if Bill had lived, they would have had to make a decision, and I don’t think they’d have decided to go away together. Bill said once--not to me, to Nancy--that he knew it would be an--unsporting--thing to do.” I think she saw, although I said nothing, that, to my captiousness, the word came as something of an anticlimax. It suggested bathos. “As she so often does,” Mary replied to my unspoken comment. “That’s the idiom of Bill’s generation, isn’t it? An earlier one spoke of ‘honor’ and one earlier still of the Ten Commandments. I can’t imagine Bill or Mrs. Harter taking the Commandments, as such, very seriously--can you? The form in which that ideal has been cast is out of date. But the ideal is still there. Personally, I think they would have subscribed to it--in their own way.” “Translated into the terms of the football field,” said I coldly. “If you like,” Mary agreed, unruffled. “Although Bill doesn’t suggest that particular association to my mind in the very least.” Nor to mine--as she well knew. “What has happened to Mrs. Harter?” I asked, not caring to pursue the other issue just then. “I don’t know. She’s quite clever enough to have found a job, and kept it, if she wanted to.” “If--yes. But what about all the years since her marriage--Egypt, and the dances, and the cocktails, and the men who fell in love with her--you remember the stories that fellow Leeds told us?” “She won’t go back to that. Bill spoiled all that for her, you know. And, anyway, she has no money now, has she?” “Harter?” “She isn’t going to see him again.” “She’s deserted him?” “If you care to put it like that, yes. I suppose one can say he’s been sent to prison and when he comes out he’ll not find his wife. She’s deserted him. But, on the other hand, she would also have ‘deserted’ him if he hadn’t been sent to prison at all. It isn’t because he’s gone to prison that she’s left him. I don’t know why I tell you these things in so many words, Miles. You know them as well as I do, really.”