"She forbade me to--but all the same I did. I behaved like an idiot, of course. Lost my temper and all that sort of thing. He was as cool as a cucumber. He denied nothing and admitted nothing. He pretended to think I had been drinking, and that enraged me the more. I was fool enough to strike him. He got all the best of it. He picked himself up smiling sweetly and said that nothing could induce him to resent anything addressed by a person in whom Miss Ottley was interested. The inference was that he loved her in an infinitely superior way to me. I felt like choking him for a bit. And would you believe it--he actually offered to shake hands." "A dangerous man, my lad. Beware of him." "He gives me the creeps," said the Captain. "But let's talk of something else pleasanter." We talked of Miss Ottley, or rather he did, while I listened, till midnight. Then he strolled with me to Bruton Street and we parted at Dixon Hubbard's doorstep as the clocks were striking one. I found Hubbard seated before the fire, smoking, and staring dreamily up at a portrait of his wife that rested on the mantel. "I've found out why I married her, Pinsent," he said slowly. "It was to benefit a Jew named Maurice Levi--the most awful bounder in London. She had been borrowing from him at twenty-five per cent. to pay some of her brother's gambling debts. Levi wanted to marry her, and would have, too, if I had not stepped in to save him. She is the dearest little woman in the world. She shed some tears. They cost me about a thousand pounds apiece." "Good-night, Dixon," I said gently. "Tears, idle tears," he murmured. "The poet, mark you, did not speak of woman's tears." Then he closed his eyes and heaved a deep sigh. "You find me changed, Pinsent?" "A little." "For better or worse? Be frank with me." "For the better. This afternoon for the first time in our acquaintance I beheld you in a lady's drawing-room. You are growing tolerant of your kind." "I am no longer a misanthrope, but I am rapidly becoming a misogynist. Yes, I am altered, old friend, greatly altered. At the bottom of my former misanthropy was a diseased conviction born of vanity that I was the only person in the world really worth thinking badly about. But marriage has compelled me to think more badly still of somebody else. The less selfish outlook thus induced has broadened my mind. I begin to look forward to a time when my perversion will be complete and I shall be able without blushing to look any woman in the face and acknowledge her superiority in innate viciousness." "I begin to pity your wife, Dixon."