ER [wounded] Oh, you are cruel, cruel. When he was alive I did not
know the greatness of my blessing. I worried meanly about little things.
I was unkind to him. I was unworthy of him.

RIDGEON [laughing bitterly] Ha!

JENNIFER. Dont insult me: dont blaspheme. [She snatches up the book and
presses it to her heart in a paroxysm of remorse, exclaiming] Oh, my
King of Men!

RIDGEON. King of Men! Oh, this is too monstrous, too grotesque. We cruel
doctors have kept the secret from you faithfully; but it is like all
secrets: it will not keep itself. The buried truth germinates and breaks
through to the light.

JENNIFER. What truth?

RIDGEON. What truth! Why, that Louis Dubedat, King of Men, was the most
entire and perfect scoundrel, the most miraculously mean rascal, the
most callously selfish blackguard that ever made a wife miserable.

JENNIFER [unshaken: calm and lovely] He made his wife the happiest woman
in the world, doctor.

RIDGEON. No: by all thats true on earth, he made his WIDOW the happiest
woman in the world; but it was I who made her a widow. And her happiness
is my justification and my reward. Now you know what I did and what I
thought of him. Be as angry with me as you like: at least you know me as
I really am. If you ever come to care for an elderly man, you will know
what you are caring for.

JENNIFER [kind and quiet] I am not angry with you any more, Sir Colenso.
I knew quite well that you did not like Louis; but it is not your fault:
you dont understand: that is all. You never could have believed in him.
It is just like your not believing in my religion: it is a sort of sixth
sense that you have not got. And [with a gentle reassuring movement
towards him] dont think that you have shocked me so dreadfully. I know
quite well what you mean by his selfishness. He sacrificed everything
for his art. In a certain sense he had even to sacrifice everybody--

RIDGEON. Everybody except himself. By keeping that back he lost the
right to sacrifice you, and gave me the right to sacrifice him. Which I
did.

JENNIFER [shaking her head, pitying his error] He was one of the men who
know what women know: that self-sacrifice is vain and cowardly.

RIDGEON. Yes, when the sacrifice is rejected and thrown away. Not when
it becomes the food of godhead.

JENNIFER. I dont understand that. And I cant argue with you: you are
clever enough to puzzle me, but not to shake me. You are so utterly, so
wildly wrong; so incapab