would go to the stake vowing she had been a good wife to him. There are a great many women, I find, who think that if they neither leave nor deceive their husbands they are being good wives to them. I pray that something—God knows what!—will happen, to make a change of attitude easy for her. She would have been happy, poor girl, with a dull fellow to whom she could have condescended.
"I often say to myself, Stephen, that to realize the imperfection of our relation to God, it is only necessary to realize the imperfection of our relation to one another.
"I have made a discovery of late. At least I think it is a discovery. This is it. I believe that while the majority of men are content to be merely themselves, the majority of women are busy playing some rôle or other that takes their fancy or that circumstances suggest. I think that most women are forever conscious of an audience. I shall never forget a girl I once knew—she would be a very old woman now—who pretended to have lost her lover in the Crimean War. I knew—for she made me her confidante—that it was a quite imaginary lover, and that she had invented him to make people think her inconsolable, instead of unsought, as was actually the case. So for years