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He had fancied hier to take it; yet his first feeling on hearing that the course of events was changed had been one of relief Noever, as he walked ho distaste for what lay before hi unknown or unfamiliar in the path he was presumably to tread; but when he had trodden it before it was as a free man, as accountable to no one for his actions, and could lend hiame of precautions and prevarications, concealments and compliances, that the part required This procedure was called "protecting a woman's honour"; and the best fiction, co since initiated him into every detail of its code

Now he saw the ularly 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 s, 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 ht not to be held too strictly to account; and even in the ainst the husband

But in Archer's little world no one laughed at a wife deceived, and a certain measure of conte after nised 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 tiument 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 judg 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