Honoria,
who loves and marries Arthur, leaving Frederic out in the cold;
whereupon Frederic turns round and marries Jane, knowing all the while
that he does not love her and does love Honoria. What kind of a
Faithful Forever is this? A man cannot love two women simultaneously,
whatever he may do consecutively. If he ceases to love the first, he
is surely not faithful forever. If he does not cease to love her, he
is false forever to the second,--and worse than false. Marrying from
pique or indifference or disappointment is one of the greatest crimes
that can be committed, as well as one of the greatest blunders that can
be made. The man who can do such a thing is a liar and a perjurer. I
can understand that people should give up the people they love, but
there is no possible shadow of excuse for their taking people whom they
don't love. It is no matter how inferior Jane may be to Frederic. A
woman can feel a good many things that she cannot analyze or
understand, and there never yet was a woman so stupid that she did not
know whether or not her husband loved her, and was not either stricken
or savage to find that he did not. No woman ever was born with a heart
so small that anything less than the whole of her husband's heart could
fill it.

Moreover, apart from unhappy consequences, there is a right and a wrong
about it. How dare a man stand up solemnly before God and his fellows
with a lie in his right hand? and if he does do it, how dare a poet or
a novelist step up and glorify him in it? The man who commits a crime
does not do so much mischief as the man who turns the criminal into a
hero. Frederic Graham did a weak, wicked, mean, and cowardly deed, not
being in his general nature weak, wicked, mean, or cowardly, and was
allowed to blunder on to a tolerable sort of something like happiness
in the end. No one has a right to complain, for all of us get a great
deal more and better than we deserve. We have no right to complain of
Providence, but we have a right to complain of the poet who comes up
and says not a word in reprobation of the meanness and cowardice, not a
word of the cruelty inflicted upon Jane, nor the wrong done to his own
soul; but veils the wickedness, excites our sympathy and pity, and in
fact makes Frederic out to be a sort of sublime and suffering martyr.
He was no martyr at all. Nobody is a martyr, if he cannot help
himself. If Frederic had the least spirit of martyrdom, he would hav