him, I
needn't tell you. Unfortunately, however, I made no inquiries of any
kind till after I had been actually married four or five months. I found
out then that what he had told me was perfectly true. And that sort of
thing makes a man so absolutely uninteresting.
LADY HUNSTANTON: My dear!
MRS ALLONBY: Men always want to be a woman's first love. That is their
clumsy vanity. We women have a more subtle instinct about things. What
we like is to be a man's last romance.
LADY STUTFIELD: I see what you mean. It's very, very beautiful.
LADY HUNSTANTON: My dear child, you don't mean to tell me that you won't
forgive your husband because he never loved anyone else? Did you ever
hear such a thing, Caroline? I am quite surprised.
LADY CAROLINE: Oh, women have become so highly educated, Jane, that
nothing should surprise us nowadays, except happy marriages. They
apparently are getting remarkably rare.
MRS ALLONBY: Oh, they're quite out of date.
LADY STUTFIELD: Except amongst the middle classes, I have been told.
MRS ALLONBY: How like the middle classes!
LADY STUTFIELD: Yes - is it not? - very, very like them.
LADY CAROLINE: If what you tell us about the middle classes is true,
Lady Stutfield, it redounds greatly to their credit. It is much to be
regretted that in our rank of life the wife should be so persistently
frivolous, under the impression apparently that it is the proper thing
to be. It is to that I attribute the unhappiness of so many marriages we
all know of in society.
MRS ALLONBY: Do you know, Lady Caroline, I don't think the frivolity of
the wife has ever anything to do with it. More marriages are ruined
nowadays by the common sense of the husband than by
.
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