But if they happen to be your particular
virtues you will go all to pieces if you let them go. And Leonora let
them. go. She let them go before poor Edward did even. Consider
her position when she burst out over the Luther-Protest. . . .
Consider her agonies. . . .
You are to remember that the main passion of her life was to get
Edward back; she had never, till that moment, despaired of getting
him back. That may seem ignoble; but you have also to remember
that her getting him back represented to her not only a victory for
herself. It would, as it appeared to her, have been a victory for all
wives and a victory for her Church. That was how it presented
itself to her. These things are a little inscrutable. I don't know why
the getting back of Edward should have represented to her a
victory for all wives, for Society and for her Church. Or, maybe, I
have a glimmering of it. She saw life as a perpetual sex-baffle
between husbands who desire to be unfaithful to their wives, and
wives who desire to recapture their husbands in the end. That was
her sad and modest view of matrimony. Man, for her, was a sort
of brute who must have his divagations, his moments of excess, his
nights out, his, let us say, rutting seasons.
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