“It was he with his music who was the cause of it all. You know at the trial the case was put as if it was all caused by jealousy. No such thing; that is, I don’t mean ‘no such thing,’ it was and yet it was not. At the trial it was decided that I was a wronged husband and that I had killed her while defending my outraged honour (that is the phrase they employ, you know). That is why I was acquitted. I tried to explain matters at the trial but they took it that I was trying to rehabilitate my wife’s honour.

“What my wife’s relations with that musician may have been has no meaning for me, or for her either. What has a meaning is what I have told you about⁠—my swinishness. The whole thing was an outcome of the terrible abyss between us of which I have told you⁠—that dreadful tension of mutual hatred which made the first excuse sufficient to produce a crisis. The quarrels between us had for some time past become frightful, and were all the more startling because they alternated with similarly intense animal passion.