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And there is something I know you'll be very pleased to hear,
she continued. Who do you think called on me yesterday? Mrs.
Willoughby. Her husband wants me to spend August and September
at a place they have taken in North Wales, and help him with his
new bookas a private secretary, you know. I said that I never
went into society. I must tell you this was the first time I had
seen her. She put her hand on my arm in the sweetest way in the
world and said: 'I know all about it, my dear, and that is why I
thought I'd come myself as Harold's ambassador.' Wasn't it
beautiful of her?
She looked at me and her eyes were filled with tears.
Marcus dear, I am not a bad woman, am I?
My dearest, I answered, very deeply touched, you are the best
woman in the world. So far from conferring a favour on you, Mrs.
Willoughby has gained for herself the inestimable privilege of
your friendship.
Ah! said Judith, a man cannot tell what it means.
Really men are not such dullard dunderheads as women are pleased
to imagine. I have the most crystalline perception of what Mrs.
Willoughby's invitation means to Judith. Women appear to find a
morbid satisfaction in the fiction that their sex is actuated by
a mysterious nexus of emotions and motives which the grosser
sense of man is powerless to appreciate. In her heart of hearts
it is a prodigious comfort to a woman to feel herself
misunderstood. Even she who is most perfectly mated, and is
intellectually convinced that the difference of sex is no barrier
to his complete knowledge of her, loves to cherish some little
secret bit of her nature, to which _he_, on account of his
masculinity, will be eternally blind. Of course there are
dull men who could not understand a tabbycat or a professional
cricketer, let alone an expert autothaumaturgista
selfmysterymakerlike a woman. But an intelligent and
painstaking man should find no difficulty in appreciating what,
after all, is merely a point of view; for what women see from that
point of view they are as indiscreet in revealing as a twoyearold
babe. I have confessed before that I do not understand Judith
that is to say the whole welter of contradictions in which her ego
consistsbut that is solely because I have not taken the trouble
to subject her to special microscopic study. Such a scientific
analysis would, I think, be an immodest discourtesy towards any
lady of my acquaintance, especially towards one for whom I bear
considerable affection. It would be as unwarrantable for a

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