s Ashburnham whether she had told Florence that and what
Florence had said and she answered:--"Florence didn't offer any comment
at all. What could she say? There wasn't anything to be said. With the
grinding poverty we had to put up with to keep up appearances, and the
way the poverty came about--you know what I mean--any woman would have
been justified in taking a lover and presents too. Florence once said
about a very similar position--she was a little too well-bred, too
American, to talk about mine--that it was a case of perfectly open
riding and the woman could just act on the spur of the moment. She said
it in American of course, but that was the sense of it. I think her
actual words were: 'That it was up to her to take it or leave it....'"

I don't want you to think that I am writing Teddy Ashburnham down a
brute. I don't believe he was. God knows, perhaps all men are like that.
For as I've said what do I know even of the smoking-room? Fellows come
in and tell the most extraordinarily gross stories--so gross that they
will positively give you a pain. And yet they'd be offended if you
suggested that they weren't the sort of person you could trust your wife
alone with. And very likely they'd be quite properly offended--that is
if you can trust anybody alone with anybody. But that sort of fellow
obviously takes more delight in listening to or in telling gross
stories--more delight than in anything else in the world. They'll
hunt languidly and dress languidly and dine languidly and work without
enthusiasm and find it a bore to carry on three minutes' conversation
about anything whatever and yet, when the other sort of conversation
begins, they'll laugh and wake up and throw themselves about in their
chairs. Then, if they so delight in the narration, how is it possible
that they can be offended--and properly offended--at the suggestion
that they might make attempts upon your wife's honour? Or again:
Edward Ashburnham was the cleanest looking sort of chap;--an excellent
magistrate, a first rate soldier, one of the best landlords, so they
said, in Hampshire, England. To the poor and to hopeless drunkards, as I
myself have witnessed, he was like a painstaking guardian. And he never
told a story that couldn't have gone into the columns of the Field more
than once or twice in all the nine years of my knowing him. He didn't
even like hearing them; he would fidget and get up and go out to buy a
cigar or something of that sort