thing, when she would have to ask
herself, and not once only, what sort of man it really was who was
willing to break his engagement and run off with another man's wife, and
whether he could ever repent enough for it. She could make excuses for
him, and would, but at the bottom of her heart--No, it seems to me
that there, almost for the only time, Tourguenief permitted himself an
amiable weakness. All that part of the book has the air of begging the
question."

"But don't you see," said Miss Cotton, leaning forward in the way she
had when very earnest, "that he means to show that her love is strong
enough for all that?"

"But he doesn't, because it isn't. Love isn't strong enough to save
people from unhappiness through each other's faults. Do you suppose that
so many married people are unhappy in each other because they don't love
each other? No; it's because they do love each other that their faults
are such a mutual torment. If they were indifferent, they wouldn't mind
each other's faults. Perhaps that's the reason why there are so many
American divorces; if they didn't care, like Europeans, who don't marry
for love, they could stand it."

"Then the moral is," said Mrs. Pasmer, at her lightest through the
surrounding gravity, "that as all Americans marry for love, only
Americans who have been very good ought to get married."

"I'm not sure that the have-been goodness is enough either," said Mrs.
Brinkley, willing to push it to the absurd. "You marry a man's future as
well as his past."

"Dear me! You are terribly exigeante, Mrs. Brinkley," said Mrs. Pasmer.

"One can afford to be so--in the abstract," answered Mrs. Brinkley.

They all stopped talking and looked at John Munt, who was coming toward
them, and each felt a longing to lay the matter before him.

There was probably not a woman among them but had felt more, read more,
and thought more than John Munt, but he was a man, and the mind of a
man is the court of final appeal for the wisest women. Till some man has
pronounced upon their wisdom, they do not know whether it is wisdom or
not.

Munt drew up his chair, and addressed himself to the whole group through
Mrs. Pasmer: "We are thinking of getting up a little picnic to-morrow."

XIV.

The day of the picnic struggled till ten o'clock to peer through the fog
that wrapt it with that remote damp and coolness and that nearer drouth
and warmth which some fogs have. The low pine groves hung full of i