re not even the best things.
But if they happen to be your particular virtues you will go all to
pieces if you let them go. And Leonora let them go. She let them go
before poor Edward did even. Consider her position when she burst out
over the Luther-Protest.... Consider her agonies....

You are to remember that the main passion of her life was to get Edward
back; she had never, till that moment, despaired of getting him back.
That may seem ignoble; but you have also to remember that her getting
him back represented to her not only a victory for herself. It would, as
it appeared to her, have been a victory for all wives and a victory for
her Church. That was how it presented itself to her. These things are a
little inscrutable. I don't know why the getting back of Edward should
have represented to her a victory for all wives, for Society and for
her Church. Or, maybe, I have a glimmering of it. She saw life as a
perpetual sex-baffle between husbands who desire to be unfaithful to
their wives, and wives who desire to recapture their husbands in the
end. That was her sad and modest view of matrimony. Man, for her, was a
sort of brute who must have his divagations, his moments of excess, his
nights out, his, let us say, rutting seasons. She had read few novels,
so that the idea of a pure and constant love succeeding the sound of
wedding bells had never been very much presented to her. She went,
numbed and terrified, to the Mother Superior of her childhood's convent
with the tale of Edward's infidelities with the Spanish dancer, and all
that the old nun, who appeared to her to be infinitely wise, mystic and
reverend, had done had been to shake her head sadly and to say:

"Men are like that. By the blessing of God it will all come right in the
end."

That was what was put before her by her spiritual advisers as her
programme in life. Or, at any rate, that was how their teachings came
through to her--that was the lesson she told me she had learned of them.
I don't know exactly what they taught her. The lot of women was patience
and patience and again patience--ad majorem Dei gloriam--until upon the
appointed day, if God saw fit, she should have her reward. If then, in
the end, she should have succeeded in getting Edward back she would have
kept her man within the limits that are all that wifehood has to expect.
She was even taught that such excesses in men are natural, excusable--as
if they had been children.

And the gre