hat lay
before him. There was nothing unknown or unfamiliar in the path he was
presumably to tread; but when he had trodden it before it was as a free
man, who was accountable to no one for his actions, and could lend
himself with an amused detachment to the game of precautions and
prevarications, concealments and compliances, that the part required.
This procedure was called "protecting a woman's honour"; and the best
fiction, combined with the after-dinner talk of his elders, had long
since initiated him into every detail of its code.

Now he saw the matter in a new light, and his part in it seemed
singularly diminished. It was, in fact, that which, with a secret
fatuity, he had watched Mrs. Thorley Rushworth play toward a fond and
unperceiving husband: a smiling, bantering, humouring, watchful and
incessant lie. A lie by day, a lie by night, a lie in every touch and
every look; a lie in every caress and every quarrel; a lie in every
word and in every silence.

It was easier, and less dastardly on the whole, for a wife to play such
a part toward her husband. A woman's standard of truthfulness was
tacitly held to be lower: she was the subject creature, and versed in
the arts of the enslaved. Then she could always plead moods and
nerves, and the right not to be held too strictly to account; and even
in the most strait-laced societies the laugh was always against the
husband.

But in Archer's little world no one laughed at a wife deceived, and a
certain measure of contempt was attached to men who continued their
philandering after marriage. In the rotation of crops there was a
recognised season for wild oats; but they were not to be sown more than
once.

Archer had always shared this view: in his heart he thought Lefferts
despicable. But to love Ellen Olenska was not to become a man like
Lefferts: for the first time Archer found himself face to face with the
dread argument of the individual case. Ellen Olenska was like no other
woman, he was like no other man: their situation, therefore, resembled
no one else's, and they were answerable to no tribunal but that of
their own judgment.

Yes, but in ten minutes more he would be mounting his own doorstep; and
there were May, and habit, and honour, and all the old decencies that
he and his people had always believed in ...

At his corner he hesitated, and then walked on down Fifth Avenue.

Ahead of him, in the winter night, loomed a big unlit house. As he
dr