n her psychology. She would not, I mean, have minded if I
had discovered that she was the mistress of Edward Ashburnham. She would
rather have liked it. Indeed, the chief trouble of poor Leonora in those
days was to keep Florence from making, before me, theatrical displays,
on one line or another, of that very fact. She wanted, in one mood,
to come rushing to me, to cast herself on her knees at my feet and to
declaim a carefully arranged, frightfully emotional, outpouring as to
her passion. That was to show that she was like one of the great erotic
women of whom history tells us. In another mood she would desire to come
to me disdainfully and to tell me that I was considerably less than a
man and that what had happened was what must happen when a real male
came along. She wanted to say that in cool, balanced and sarcastic
sentences. That was when she wished to appear like the heroine of a
French comedy. Because of course she was always play acting.

But what she didn't want me to know was the fact of her first escapade
with the fellow called Jimmy. She had arrived at figuring out the sort
of low-down Bowery tough that that fellow was. Do you know what it is to
shudder, in later life, for some small, stupid action--usually for some
small, quite genuine piece of emotionalism--of your early life? Well, it
was that sort of shuddering that came over Florence at the thought that
she had surrendered to such a low fellow. I don't know that she need
have shuddered. It was her footling old uncle's work; he ought never to
have taken those two round the world together and shut himself up in his
cabin for the greater part of the time. Anyhow, I am convinced that the
sight of Mr Bagshawe and the thought that Mr Bagshawe--for she knew that
unpleasant and toadlike personality--the thought that Mr Bagshawe would
almost certainly reveal to me that he had caught her coming out of
Jimmy's bedroom at five o'clock in the morning on the 4th of August,
1900--that was the determining influence in her suicide. And no doubt
the effect of the date was too much for her superstitious personality.
She had been born on the 4th of August; she had started to go round the
world on the 4th of August; she had become a low fellow's mistress on
the 4th of August. On the same day of the year she had married me; on
that 4th she had lost Edward's love, and Bagshawe had appeared like a
sinister omen--like a grin on the face of Fate. It was the last straw.
She ran