Nobody who has followed this narrative with any intelligence can suppose that Mr. Trimblerigg was a man who did not have his temptations. What happened when he immersed Davidina in the stream without intending it, what happened when he did not immerse himself in the bath on a cold morning, has been faithfully told. But what he did to Davidina had hurt him far more than what he did to himself. It had hurt him because Davidina had found him out, and then had not allowed him to explain. He liked explaining. Explaining always made him feel right again with his own conscience. Even the look of understanding which he exchanged with himself in the glass, after some involuntary reversion to type, was sufficient as a rule to restore him to his own good opinion. To explain things, therefore, which generally meant to explain them away, was spiritual meat and drink to him. But there were two people in the world to whom he very seldom explained anything: his wife, the quiet Caroline, who understood so little that it was not worth while; and his sister Davidina who understood so much that it was dangerous. And between these two Guardian angels--who should have been his confidantes, but were not--he led a life of temptations. Not gross, or serious in kind, or extreme in degree, but temptations none the less, and all having their root in a very laudable trait of his character, his abounding love of adventure. All his life Mr. Trimblerigg had been respectable: when he married he had no bachelor episodes to conceal from his wife, except perhaps that sixpenny sale of a kiss to Lizzie Seebohm, of which he had ceased to be proud, and his temporary infatuation for Isabel Sparling which had afterwards so embarrassed him. And this rectitude of conduct was not for lack of opportunity or inclination; for women attracted him and he attracted them. Puritan training and Puritan ancestry had no doubt something to do with it: the bath-habit which he had failed in his youth to acquire materially, he had acquired spiritually. And so also with other things. He had never drunk wine or spirits; only once or twice a glass of beer, and that not for its potency or taste, but because it had froth on the top, and he liked dipping his lips into it. Surreptitiously, for the mere pleasure of concealment and doing it with boys older than himself, he had smoked a pipe a few times before becoming an adherent of True Belief, and he had not, upon escaping from the confinement of its doctrine, relinquished the abstention which had become a habit. Nor had he ever betted; though now, with a little money to turn round in, he had begun to speculate; but that was different. Finally he had never travelled.