'I knew you would be. Well, Will, I wanted to have a long talk with you. I have a great deal to say. First, I shall give you some tea--believe me, it is far better for clearing the head after a night such as last night, than Madeira. I have a great deal to tell you--I fear you will despise me--but I will hide nothing. I am resolved to hide nothing from you.' Meantime the words kept ringing in my ears. 'Matthew a gambler! The religious Matthew! To whom music was a snare of the Devil and the musician a servant of the Devil! The steady Matthew! The irreproachable Matthew!' Yet, since I had always known him to be a violator of truth; a slanderer and a backbiter, why not, also, a gambler? Why not also a murderer--a forger--anything? I was to find out before long that he was quite ready to become the former of these also, upon temptation. Yet the thing was wonderful, even after I had actually seen it and proved it. And again, Matthew married! Not to a sober and godly citizen's daughter, but to an actress of Drury Lane Theatre! Matthew, to whom the theatre was as the mouth of the Bottomless Pit! Who could believe such a thing? As for what follows, Jenny did not tell me the whole in this one afternoon. I have put together, as if it was all one conversation, what took several days or perhaps several weeks. 'You think it so wonderful, Will,' Jenny said, reading my thoughts in my face. 'For my own part it is never wonderful that a man should gamble, or drink, or throw himself away upon an unworthy mistress. Every man may go mad: it is part of man's nature: women, never, save for love and jealousy and the like. Men are so made: madness seizes them: down they go to ruin and the grave. It is strong drink with some: and avarice with some: and gaming with some. Your cousin Matthew is as mad as an Abram man.' She was silent for a while. Then she went on again. I have written it down much as if all that follows was a single speech. It was broken up by my interruptions and by her pauses and movements. For she was too quick and restless to sit down while she was speaking. She would spring from her chair and walk about the room; she would stand at the window, and drum at the panes of glass: she would stand over the fireplace; she would look in the round mirror hanging on the wall. She had a thousand restless ways. Sometimes she stood behind me and laid a hand on my shoulder as if she was ashamed for me to look upon her. It was a wonderful tale she told me: more wonderful that a woman who had gone through that companionship should come out of it, filled through and through, like a sponge, with the knowledge of wickedness and found in childhood with those who practise wickedness, yet should be herself so free from all apparent stain or taint of it. Surely, unless the face, the eyes, the voice, the language, the thoughts, can all lie together, this woman was one of the purest and most innocent of Heaven's creatures.