ed, I saw purple. I
flew at Julius. On the ferry, it was, I filled up one of his eyes; I
threatened to strangle him. And, since an unresisting negro can make
a deplorable noise and a deplorable spectacle, and, since that was
Florence's first adventure in the married state, she got a pretty idea
of my character. It affirmed in her the desperate resolve to conceal
from me the fact that she was not what she would have called "a pure
woman". For that was really the mainspring of her fantastic actions. She
was afraid that I should murder her....

So she got up the heart attack, at the earliest possible opportunity, on
board the liner. Perhaps she was not so very much to be blamed. You must
remember that she was a New Englander, and that New England had not yet
come to loathe darkies as it does now. Whereas, if she had come from
even so little south as Philadelphia, and had been an oldish family, she
would have seen that for me to kick Julius was not so outrageous an act
as for her cousin, Reggie Hurlbird, to say--as I have heard him say to
his English butler--that for two cents he would bat him on the pants.
Besides, the medicine-grip did not bulk as largely in her eyes as it did
in mine, where it was the symbol of the existence of an adored wife of a
day. To her it was just a useful lie....

Well, there you have the position, as clear as I can make it--the
husband an ignorant fool, the wife a cold sensualist with imbecile
fears--for I was such a fool that I should never have known what she was
or was not--and the blackmailing lover. And then the other lover came
along....

Well, Edward Ashburnham was worth having. Have I conveyed to you the
splendid fellow that he was--the fine soldier, the excellent landlord,
the extraordinarily kind, careful and industrious magistrate, the
upright, honest, fair-dealing, fair-thinking, public character? I
suppose I have not conveyed it to you. The truth is, that I never
knew it until the poor girl came along--the poor girl who was just as
straight, as splendid and as upright as he. I swear she was. I suppose
I ought to have known. I suppose that was, really, why I liked him so
much--so infinitely much. Come to think of it, I can remember a thousand
little acts of kindliness, of thoughtfulness for his inferiors, even
on the Continent. Look here, I know of two families of dirty,
unpicturesque, Hessian paupers that that fellow, with an infinite
patience, rooted up, got their police reports