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known all about the passion,
which had been quite a real passion and had lasted for several
years. You see, poor Edward's passions were quite logical in their
progression upwards. They began with a servant, went on to a
courtesan and then to a quite nice woman, very unsuitably mated.
For she had a quite nasty husband who, by means of letters and
things, went on blackmailing poor Edward to the tune of three or
four hundred a year—with threats of the Divorce Court. And after
this lady came Maisie Maidan, and after poor Maisie only one more
affair and then—the real passion of his life. His marriage with
Leonora had been arranged by his parents and, though he always
admired her immensely, he had hardly ever pretended to be much more
than tender to her, though he desperately needed her moral support,
too....
    But his really trying liabilities were mostly in the nature of
generosities proper to his station. He was, according to Leonora,
always remitting his tenants' rents and giving the tenants to
understand that the reduction would be permanent; he was always
redeeming drunkards who came before his magisterial bench; he was
always trying to put prostitutes into respectable places—and he was
a perfect maniac about children. I don't know how many ill-used
people he did not pick up and provide with careers—Leonora has told
me, but I daresay she exaggerated and the figure seems so
preposterous that I will not put it down. All these things, and the
continuance of them seemed to him to be his duty—along with
impossible subscriptions to hospitals and Boy Scouts and to provide
prizes at cattle shows and antivivisection societies....
    Well, Leonora saw to it that most of these things were not
continued. They could not possibly keep up Branshaw Manor at that
rate after the money had gone to the Grand Duke's mistress. She put
the rents back at their old figures; discharged the drunkards from
their homes, and sent all the societies notice that they were to
expect no more subscriptions. To the children, she was more tender;
nearly all of them she supported till the age of apprenticeship or
domestic service. You see, she was childless herself.
    She was childless herself, and she considered herself to be to
blame. She had come of a penniless branch of the Powys family, and
they had forced upon her poor dear Edward without making the
stipulation that the children should be brought up as Catholics.
And that, of course, was spiritual death to Leonora. I have given
you a wrong impression if I have not made you see that Leonora was
a woman of a strong, cold conscience, like all English Catholics.
(I cannot, myself, help disliking this religion; there is always,
at the bottom of my mind, in spite of Leonora, the feeling of
shuddering at the Scarlet Woman, that filtered in upon me in the
tranquility of the little old Friends' Meeting House in Arch
Street, Philadelphia.) So I do set down a good deal of Leonora's
mismanagement of poor dear Edward's case to the peculiarly English
form of her religion. Because, of course, the only thing to have
done for Edward would have been to let him sink down until he
became a tramp of gentlemanly address, having, maybe, chance love
affairs upon the highways. He would have done so much less harm; he
would have been much less agonized too. At any rate, he would have
had fewer chances of ruining and of remorse. For Edward was great
at remorse. But Leonora's English Catholic conscience, her rigid
principles, her coldness, even her very patience, were, I cannot
help thinking, all wrong in this special case. She quite seriously
and naïvely imagined that the Church of Rome disapproves of
divorce; she quite seriously and naïvely believed that her church
could be such a monstrous and imbecile institution as to expect her
to take on the impossible job of making Edward Ashburnham a
faithful husband. She had, as the English would say, the
Nonconformist temperament. In the United States of North America we
call it the