"I don't believe it," Mrs. Touchett declared.

"He's dead then, is he?" one of the men asked.

"Why, you don't suppose if he were alive he could ever hold up his
head again, with these letters being read by everybody?" Mrs.
Touchett protested. "It must have been horrible enough to know
they'd been written to him; but to publish them! No man could
have done it and no woman could have told him to--"

"Oh, come, come," Dresham judicially interposed; "after all,
they're not love-letters."

"No--that's the worst of it; they're unloved letters," Mrs.
Touchett retorted.

"Then, obviously, she needn't have written them; whereas the man,
poor devil, could hardly help receiving them."

"Perhaps he counted on the public to save him the trouble of
reading them," said young Hartly, who was in the cynical stage.

Mrs. Armiger turned her reproachful loveliness to Dresham. "From
the way you defend him, I believe you know who he is."

Everyone looked at Dresham, and his wife smiled with the superior
air of the woman who is in her husband's professional secrets.
Dresham shrugged his shoulders.

"What have I said to defend him?"