She must know that this affair, by nine chances out of ten, could not fail to eventuate at the best in a marriage as tiresome as most other marriages, and yet she was abandoning herself with those ignorant young people to the illusion that it was the finest and sweetest thing in life.
"Well, isn't it ?" his wife asked.
"Yes, that's the worst of it.

It shows how poverty-stricken life really is.

We want somehow to believe that each pair of lovers will find the good we have missed, and be as happy as we expected to be." "I think we have been happy enough, and that we've had as much good as was wholesome for us," she returned, hurt.
"You're always so concrete! I meant us in the abstract.

But if you will be personal, I'll say that you've been as happy as you deserve, and got more good than you had any right to." She laughed with him, and then they laughed again to perceive that they were walking arm in arm too, like the lovers, whom they were insensibly following.
He proposed that while they were in the mood they should go again to the old cemetery, and see the hinged jaw of the murdered Paumgartner, wagging in eternal accusation of his murderess.

"It's rather hard on her, that he should be having the last word, that way," he said.