“Your wife might have something to say to that. By the way, when is she coming back?” “Not yet awhile,” I answered irritably. “Would you like to come to-morrow?” “I’d love it,” said Margaret, “but till I know you better you mustn’t take me too far.” She said that lightly, but with a certain emphasis. My recent social experiences had taught me that the average young woman of her class was at best a _demi-vierge_, and such a remark from such an one would merely have implied encouragement for a casual intrigue, but I knew Margaret hadn’t a trace of the promiscuous rip in her make-up, and I knew she knew I loved her, and that she mistrusted her powers of resistance. This went to my heart. So it began, and it moved swiftly. A few days later we decided that it was impossible for her to stay on with the Franks and continue to see me each day. So I took a flat in Paris, and there we lived together. “In sin,” you suggest, number two. If you like to, call it so. When one has lost and found oneself in a woman, what the respectable sensualist focuses his smutty spectacles upon and the Law deliciously terms “misconduct” becomes of the most petty importance. It is not quite negligible, for in that hopeless, tantalising longing for complete fusion, when four eyes almost become two, and two minds just not one, when in fleeting seconds of ecstasy the illusion of this complete unison is attained, that mechanical conjunction is inevitable. But to those who love imaginatively and therefore hunger and thirst and lust and strive to isolate themselves from the rest of mankind, this physically compelled commonplace loses its significance. It was only Margaret who could make me dread to die. I told Ethel I should be abroad for a while, but she showed no interest in the information. By the time a month was up Margaret and I were just not one person, and I the unhappiest man in the world, for even if the view Prometheus enjoyed from his eyrie was the loveliest in the world, he must for ever have turned his eyes away from it to search for that speck in the sky. And often when I was alone with Margaret and for the moment utterly happy and at peace, it seemed that Ethel’s face crept in between us, and once again I felt that foul longing to get my hands to her throat. She would never divorce me. I knew it, and I could not force permanently on Margaret the uneasy, furtive alternative. She would have accepted it gladly and made the best of it, but I could not do it. “You preferred to murder your wife,” I hear you murmur with some irony, number two. Yes, number two, I preferred to murder my wife.