‘I know what you’re going to say — he was a very good man. But I know it better than any one, because I gave him more chance to show it. In that I think I was a good wife.’ Mrs Touchett added that at the end her husband apparently recognised the fact. ‘He has treated me most liberally,’ she said; ‘I won’t say more liberally than I expected, because I didn’t expect. You know that as a general thing I don’t expect. But he chose, I presume, to recognise the fact that though I lived much abroad and mingled — you may say freely — in foreign life, I never exhibited the smallest preference for any one else.’

‘For any one but yourself,” Madame Merle mentally observed; but the reflexion was perfectly inaudible.

‘I never sacrificed my husband to another,’ Mrs Touchett continued with her stout curtness.

‘Oh, no,’ thought Madame Merle, ‘you never did anything for another!’