“I find them,” Gerald stated, “vast nuisances. Candor is no more palatable than an oyster when either is out of season. And my relatives are all cursed with a very disastrous candor. They conceal from me nothing save that respect and envy with which they might, appropriately, regard my accomplishments and nobler qualities.” “That has been the way with all relatives, Gerald, since Cain and Abel were brothers.” “Still, but for one calamity, I could, it might be, endure my brothers. I could put up with my sisters’ voluble and despondent view of my future. I might even go so far in supererogation as to condone—upon alternate Thursdays, say,—a chorus of affectionate aunts who speak for my own good.” “The first person, Gerald, that pretended to speak for the real good of anybody else was a serpent in a Garden, and ever since then that sort of talking has been venomous.” “Yet all these afflictions I might,” said Gerald,—“conceivably, at least, I might be able to endure, if only the pursuit of my art had not been hampered, and the ease of my body blasted, by the greatest blessing which can befall any man.” “You allude, I imagine,” said the Sylan, “to the love of a good woman?” “That is it, that is precisely the unmerited and too irremovable blessing which may end, after all, in reducing me to your suggested vulgar fraction of a suicide.” Now Gerald was silent. He leaned far back in his chair. He meditatively placed together the tips of his two little fingers, and then one by one the tips of his other fingers, until his thumbs also were in contact; and he regarded the result, upon the whole, with disapprobation. “Every marriage gets at least one man into trouble,” he philosophised, “and it is not always the bridegroom. You see, sir, by the worst of luck, this Evelyn Townsend was already married, so that ours had necessarily to become an adulterous union. It is the tragedy of my life that I met my Cousin Evelyn too late to marry her. Any married person of real ingenuity and tolerable patience can induce his wife to divorce him. But there is no way known to me for a Southern gentleman to get rid of a lady whom he has possessed illegally, until she has displayed the decency to become tired of him. And Evelyn, sir, in this matter of continuing her immoral relations with me has behaved badly, very badly indeed—” “All women—” Glaum began. “No, but let us not be epigrammatic and aphoristic and generally flippant about a perverseness which is pestering me beyond any reasonable endurance! You know as well as I do that every pretty woman ought, by and by, to remember what she owes to her husband and to her marriage vows, and to act accordingly. Repentance when suitably timed in a liaison makes for everybody’s happiness. But some women, sir, some women stay more affectionately adhesive than an anaconda. They weep. They reply to their helpless paramours’ every least attempt at any rational statement, ‘And I trusted you! I gave you all!’”