You think I should have been moist and mushy, should have taken her back, should have burdened myself for the rest of my days with her insincere and unsympathetic personality. You are saying: “But after all she loved him.” Even so--what does the word love mean when used by a person of her character? It means nothing but the narrowest, blighting selfishness. She had for years used me without any thought for or of my feelings, wishes, needs. When we moved into our grand New York house she gave me as a bedroom the noisiest room in the house, one overlooking the street where the rattling of carriages, cabs, and carts and the talk and laughter of pedestrians kept me awake until far into the night and roused me about four in the morning--this, when I was working with might and main all day long and needed every moment of rest I could get. Why did she give me that room? Because she wanted the only available quiet room--beside her own bedroom--for a dressing room! She said the light in the room she gave me was unfit to dress by! I thought nothing of all this at the time. It is characteristic of American wives to do these things; it is characteristic of American men to regard them as the matter of course. I cite the small but not insignificant incident to show the minuteness of her indifference to me. I have already given many of the larger though perhaps less important instances, and I could give scores, hundreds, in the same tenor. She professed to love me at that time--and she either had or simulated a very ardent passion. But that was not love, was it? Love is generous, is considerate, finds its highest pleasure of self-gratification in making the loved one happy. Such a conception of love never entered her head--and how many American women’s heads does it enter? How it amuses me to watch them as they absorb everything, give nothing, sit enthroned upon their vanities--and then wonder and grow sulky or sour when their husbands or lovers tire of the thankless task of loving them and turn away--or turn them away. If Edna had awakened to genuine love, gentle outraged reader, would she not have been overwhelmed with shame as she looked back upon her married life? Would she have come to me with the offer of her love as a queen with the offer of her crown? She would not have indulged in empty words; she would have tried to _do_ something by way of reparation. She would not have demanded that she be taken back; but, feeling that she had forfeited her rights, she would have tried to find out whether I would consent to take her back; and if she had found that I would not, she would have accepted her fate as her desert. In those circumstances do you think I could have laughed at her and remained firm? No one not a monster could have done that.