It is, of course, possible for any
woman to cut out and to carry off any other woman's husband or
lover. But I rather think that a woman will only do this if she has
reason to believe that the other woman has given her husband a
bad time. I am certain that if she thinks the man has been a brute
to his wife she will, with her instinctive feeling for suffering
femininity, "put him back", as the saying is. I don't attach any
particular importance to these generalizations of mine. They may
be right, they may be wrong; I am only an ageing American with
very little knowledge of life. You may take my generalizations or
leave them. But I am pretty certain that I am right in the case of
Nancy Rufford--that she had loved Edward Ashburnham very
deeply and tenderly.
It is nothing to the point that she let him have it good and strong as
soon as she discovered that he had been unfaithful to Leonora and
that his public services had cost more than Leonora thought they
ought to have cost. Nancy would be bound to let him have it good
and strong then. She would owe that to feminine public opinion;
she would be driven to it by the instinct for self-preservation,
since she might well imagine that if Edward had been unfaithful
to Leonora, to Mrs Basil and to the memories of the other two, he
might be unfaithful to herself.
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