Mrs. Pepys never became pregnant during the period covered by the Diary, though there were one or two false alarms. There is no mention of any continuous or constant ill-health, such as we find in pyo-salpinx or severe tubal adhesions; and such being the case, her sterility may quite likely have been as much his fault as hers. One cannot read the Diary without wishing that we could have heard a little more of her side of the questions that arose. What did she really think of her husband when he pulled her nose? Twice, too, no less! Stevenson calls her “a vulgar woman.” Stevenson’s opinion on every matter is worthy of the highest respect, as that of a sensitive, refined, and artistic soul; but I cannot help thinking that sometimes his early Calvinistic training tended to make him rather intolerant to human weakness. His judgment of François Villon always seems to me intolerant and unjust, and he showed no sign in his novels of ever having made any effort to comprehend the difficulties and troubles which surround women in their passage through the world. He understood men--there can be no doubt of that; but I doubt if he understood women even to the small extent which is achieved by the average man. Personally I find Mrs. Pepys far from “vulgar”; generally she is simply delightful. True, one cannot concur with her action over the letter to Deb. It was cruel and ungenerous. But she probably knew her husband well by that time, and judged fairly accurately the only thing that would be likely to bring him up with a round turn, and again we have not the privilege of knowing Deb except through Pepys’s possibly too favourable eyes. Deb may have been all that Mrs. Pepys thought her, and she may have richly deserved what she got. After all, there is in every woman protecting her husband from the onslaughts of “vamps” not a little of the wild-cat. Even the gentlest of women will defend her husband--especially a husband who retains so much of the boy as Pepys--from the attempts of wicked women to steal him, poor innocent love, from her sacred hearth; will defend him with bare hands and claws, and totally regardless of the rules of combat; and it is this touch of cattishness in Mrs. Pepys which makes one’s heart warm towards her. For all we know Deb Willet may have been a “vamp.” Mrs. Pepys was certainly the “absolute female.”