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My poor wife little dreamt that I had heard the whole of Mrs. Mordaunt’s conversation, and that I had writhed under the communications she had made. For a proud, a sensitive man, to hear revealed to the object of his affections, the person on earth whose esteem he most wished to preserve, such disparaging statements, was humiliation, was torture. To have my pure-minded, my high-souled Louisa, led to believe that I could ever have bestowed a thought on the vulgar, giddy, garrulous woman, whose appearance was now divested of every personal attraction, and whose manner and bearing reminded one of what might be expected from a female rope-dancer or rider at Astley’s, ¹ was too mortifying to be borne. But to / have her led to believe that I could have wished to marry such a person, was so derogatory to me, that I felt ashamed to meet her glance. But painful, humiliating, as all this was, there existed still stronger motives of chagrin for me in the disclosures made by Mrs. Mordaunt. Had she not revealed the suppositions entertained by herself and others with regard to my sanity, – suppositions so calculated to confirm the suspicions of my wife on this point, (if indeed, as I feared, she had formed any such,) or to give birth to them if they had not previously existed, – and had she not denounced my duplicity, nay more, my want of veracity, with regard to my former acquaintance with Neville, and the termination of it, a fact that explained at once the motive of the sudden departure of him and his wife from Torquay, – my silence and concealment on this topic must inevitably lead Louisa to form the most disadvantageous opinion of me. If I had not been conscious of the wrong being on my side, why should I have withheld the truth from her? My heart was lacerated as reason whispered these truths to me, and I cursed the hour, when, under the influence of a puerile amour propre that made me shrink from confessing to the partner of my life my former acquaintance and subsequent coldness with Neville, I had concealed the truth.