“If she had been a different sort, even, they might have pulled through. But look at it. She was ambitious and sentimental. She wanted his success. She’d have been willing enough to send him out alone if he had lied to her about possibilities. He had had the honesty to realize them, and the utter brutality to tell her--that was perfectly clear from the state of both of them. Probably he didn’t think he had a right to withhold the information from her; or he might have thought it would be a clinching argument for her going with him. If you ask me, I think she was very near hating him for having enlightened her as to the dangers. Women of her kind don’t like such assumptions. And it didn’t give her a _beau rôle_. There wasn’t anything, and wouldn’t be, God knows, for her to be jealous of. But there was everything prospectively, if he went, to pity him for. A wife couldn’t fling him into that; not when he wouldn’t even pose, not when he didn’t scruple to say what she was flinging him into. However much she may have wanted to say ‘Go,’ she couldn’t. If he had only pretended to be other than he was, she could have made it out to herself that both of them were martyrs, he to his work, she to--oh, well, to the little girl. She was the kind of woman who could condone an infidelity, I imagine, in a cold, superior way; but her principles would hardly permit her to face it beforehand. And that wasn’t all--that wasn’t all. Of course she had asked him first of all--she would have--about the danger of infection; and it was evident from every suffering line in both their faces that he hadn’t hesitated to dot his i’s. She knew what was dangerous and what was not, and she knew that if Dorrien went alone he was lost. I pitied her. She had hunted, during two days, for a _beau rôle_, and she couldn’t find one. Her only hope was to get him home and trust that he would get over it, like some kind of fit. And he wouldn’t; that was clear. The only suggestion I could think of was that they should divorce, and that he should proceed to find another woman who adored him, and take her out there. That isn’t the kind of suggestion you make to people; it doesn’t sound sympathetic. It isn’t practical, either; it leaves too much to be done too quickly. Moreover, it had almost certainly never occurred to either of them that they didn’t love each other as much as any other two people did. “And they expected me to say something! They had spent forty-eight hours trying, quite in vain, to find a way out, and then had the appalling cheek and the pathetic confidence to bring it to me! “‘I can’t argue this matter,’ I said finally. ‘You must see that.’