apple that is rotten at the core and discover
its rottenness only in nine years and six months less four days, isn't
it true to say that for nine years I possessed a goodly apple? So it may
well be with Edward Ashburnham, with Leonora his wife and with poor dear
Florence. And, if you come to think of it, isn't it a little odd that
the physical rottenness of at least two pillars of our four-square
house never presented itself to my mind as a menace to its security? It
doesn't so present itself now though the two of them are actually dead.
I don't know....

I know nothing--nothing in the world--of the hearts of men. I only know
that I am alone--horribly alone. No hearthstone will ever again witness,
for me, friendly intercourse. No smoking-room will ever be other than
peopled with incalculable simulacra amidst smoke wreaths. Yet, in the
name of God, what should I know if I don't know the life of the hearth
and of the smoking-room, since my whole life has been passed in those
places? The warm hearthside!--Well, there was Florence: I believe
that for the twelve years her life lasted, after the storm that seemed
irretrievably to have weakened her heart--I don't believe that for one
minute she was out of my sight, except when she was safely tucked up in
bed and I should be downstairs, talking to some good fellow or other in
some lounge or smoking-room or taking my final turn with a cigar before
going to bed. I don't, you understand, blame Florence. But how can she
have known what she knew? How could she have got to know it? To know it
so fully. Heavens! There doesn't seem to have been the actual time. It
must have been when I was taking my baths, and my Swedish exercises,
being manicured. Leading the life I did, of the sedulous, strained
nurse, I had to do something to keep myself fit. It must have been then!
Yet even that can't have been enough time to get the tremendously long
conversations full of worldly wisdom that Leonora has reported to
me since their deaths. And is it possible to imagine that during our
prescribed walks in Nauheim and the neighbourhood she found time to
carry on the protracted negotiations which she did carry on between
Edward Ashburnham and his wife? And isn't it incredible that during
all that time Edward and Leonora never spoke a word to each other in
private? What is one to think of humanity?

For I swear to you that they were the model couple. He was as devoted
as it was possible to be without