He told me that his wife had been very much engaged in a certain work. I
had always wondered how she occupied her time. It was in writing. Like
her husband she too published a little book. Much later on I came upon
it. It had nothing to do with pedestrianism. It was a sort of hand-book
for women with grievances (and all women had them), a sort of compendious
theory and practice of feminine free morality. It made you laugh at its
transparent simplicity. But that authorship was revealed to me much
later. I didn't of course ask Fyne what work his wife was engaged on;
but I marvelled to myself at her complete ignorance of the world, of her
own sex and of the other kind of sinners. Yet, where could she have got
any experience? Her father had kept her strictly cloistered. Marriage
with Fyne was certainly a change but only to another kind of
claustration. You may tell me that the ordinary powers of observation
ought to have been enough. Why, yes! But, then, as she had set up for a
guide and teacher, there was nothing surprising for me in the discovery
that she was blind. That's quite in order. She was a profoundly
innocent person; only it would not have been proper to tell her husband
so.