Page:The Confessions of a Well-Meaning Woman.djvu/71

Confessions of a Well-Meaning Woman late. One might as profitably have spoken to the dead. . . She was not antagonistic in any way. Indeed, our meeting would have been profoundly interesting, if it had not been so painful. She was still in love with Spenworth. Men like that, dissolute and unfaithful, seem to have an animal magnetism which holds certain women in complete subjection. Kathleen was miserable at the thought of parting from her scamp of a husband.

“I couldn’t do it if I didn’t love him,” she cried.

And, if you please, I was left to understand that she was effacing herself, giving him up and making way for another woman simply because she fancied that he would be happier. I confess I should have had little patience with her, if she had not been so pitiable. Life was a blank without Spenworth.

“Then why,” I asked, “do you cut your own throat and drag the name of the family through the mire? Have you no sense of your position after all these years, no feeling for the rest of us?”

“It’s for him,” she said. And I verily believe that, if he had told her literally to cut her throat, she would have done it. . . 59