ng instinct that attaches them to the
interest of womanhood. It is, of course, possible for any woman to cut
out and to carry off any other woman's husband or lover. But I rather
think that a woman will only do this if she has reason to believe that
the other woman has given her husband a bad time. I am certain that
if she thinks the man has been a brute to his wife she will, with her
instinctive feeling for suffering femininity, "put him back", as
the saying is. I don't attach any particular importance to these
generalizations of mine. They may be right, they may be wrong; I am only
an ageing American with very little knowledge of life. You may take my
generalizations or leave them. But I am pretty certain that I am right
in the case of Nancy Rufford--that she had loved Edward Ashburnham very
deeply and tenderly.

It is nothing to the point that she let him have it good and strong as
soon as she discovered that he had been unfaithful to Leonora and that
his public services had cost more than Leonora thought they ought to
have cost. Nancy would be bound to let him have it good and strong then.
She would owe that to feminine public opinion; she would be driven to it
by the instinct for self-preservation, since she might well imagine
that if Edward had been unfaithful to Leonora, to Mrs Basil and to the
memories of the other two, he might be unfaithful to herself. And,
no doubt, she had her share of the sex instinct that makes women be
intolerably cruel to the beloved person. Anyhow, I don't know whether,
at this point, Nancy Rufford loved Edward Ashburnham. I don't know
whether she even loved him when, on getting, at Aden, the news of his
suicide she went mad. Because that may just as well have been for the
sake of Leonora as for the sake of Edward. Or it may have been for the
sake of both of them. I don't know. I know nothing. I am very tired.
Leonora held passionately the doctrine that the girl didn't love Edward.
She wanted desperately to believe that. It was a doctrine as necessary
to her existence as a belief in the personal immortality of the soul.
She said that it was impossible that Nancy could have loved Edward
after she had given the girl her view of Edward's career and character.
Edward, on the other hand, believed maunderingly that some essential
attractiveness in himself must have made the girl continue to go on
loving him--to go on loving him, as it were, in underneath her official
aspect of hatred. He thou