My thought of Tilly on her wedding morning is of one exiled from happiness because nature withheld from her the one thing needed to make her all but perfect: that needful thing was just a little more constancy. It is her doom, forever to stretch out her hand toward a brimming goblet, but ere she can bring it to her lips it drops from her hand. Forever her hand stretched out toward joy and forever joy shattered at her feet. American scientists have lately discovered or seem about to discover, some new fact in Nature--the butterfly migrates. What we have thought to be the bright-winged inhabitant of a single summer in a single zone follows summer's retreating wave and so dwells in a summer that is perpetual. If Tilly is the psyche of life's fields, then she seeks perpetual summer as the law of her own being. All our lives move along old, old paths. There is no new path for any of us. If Tilly's fate is the butterfly path, who can judge her harshly? Not I. They sail away at once on their wedding journey. He has wealth and social influence of the fashionable sort which overflows into the social mirrors of metropolitan journalism: the papers found space for their plans of travel: England and Scotland, France and Switzerland, Austria and Germany, Bohemia and Poland, Russia, Italy and Sicily--home. The great world-path of the human butterfly, seeking summer with insatiate quest. Home to his practice with that still fluttering psyche! And then the path--the domestic path--stretching straight onward across the fields of life--what of his psyche then? Will she fold her wings on a bed-post--year after year slowly opening and unfolding those brilliant wings amid the cob-webs of the same bed-post?... I cannot write of human life unless I can forgive life. How forgive unless I can understand? I have wrought with all that is within me to understand Polly--her treachery up to the last moment, her betrayal of Ben's devotion. What I have made out dimly, darkly, doubtfully, is this: Her whole character seems built upon one trait, one virtue--loyalty. She was disloyal to Ben because she had come to believe that he was disloyal to her sovereign excellence. There were things in his life which he persistently refused to tell; perhaps every day there were mere trifles which he did not share with her--why should he? On a certain memorable morning she discovered that for years he had been keeping from her some affairs of mine: that was his loyalty to me; she thought it was his disloyalty to her. I cannot well picture Polly as a lute, but I think that was the rift in the lute. Still a man must not surrender himself wholly into the keeping of the woman he loves; let him, and he becomes anything in her life but a man.