"But I've been wandering disgracefully all over the place, for I set out to tell you that, at the end of a few years, Tristram at last realised what a mess she and he had made of it together, and then, dear fellow that he really was, he sat up and swallowed his gruel, and put her in the way of divorcing him, as a gentleman should. "But all that, of course, happened much later. My life touched theirs, or hers in particular, if you like, only in the first year of their marriage, when I used to see a great deal of them during the season at their house in South Audley Street; and more week-ends than not I spent with them at Carew's place in Wiltshire.... He was a very queer sort of fellow, full of odd enthusiasms and intolerances, un-English in his incessant contempt for the regularities and pretences of life, though English enough in his hearty manner of showing that contempt. He was strange, too arrogantly made to care much whether he was found acceptable or unacceptable by others, and therefore a man without friends, because, poor fool, 'he preferred his own and Consuelo's company'; and even so he didn't love his young wife half as much as he would have done if he weren't certain that she worshipped him--though that childish contempt for happiness, as it can be called, was well punished in those wretched years later on, when his six foot odd of manhood must have made begging grotesques on the floor while she, perhaps pitying him, was as cruel as only a surfeited woman can be cruel--and, my God, how cruel!... The man's nature, being what it was, then, you can well understand that, quite literally, he had no friends, and that I was about the only man he could rub along with, the only man that he liked, in fact; while, as for myself, although in the ordinary way I couldn't have borne his particular sort of arrogance too long, I would have suffered all the one-eyed giants in the nether-world for the sake of being near that chit of a girl, as she was then; and as, indeed, she always was, except to the men who bored her with too much love. "Besides, if one has set out to be a cad for once in a way, one may as well do the thing properly--so I had to get on with Tristram, or else no Consuelo! Of course there's nothing in the world to be said for my behaviour, it was rotten-bad. Instead of running away, I hung on, and did all I could to make my friend's wife love me one tenth as much as I loved her. And you will notice that there was no limit to my utter rottenness--I not only tried all I could to snatch the man's wife, but accepted his hospitality as a means to that end. If I ever heard of any son of mine doing the like of that by a friend, I'd send him to the deuce without a penny--and, anyway, the young cub wouldn't have such an excuse, such a marvellous excuse as Consuelo!