I suppose that, during all that time I was a deceived husband and
that Leonora was pimping for Edward. That was the cross that she
had to take up during her long Calvary of a life. . . .

You ask how it feels to be a deceived husband. Just Heavens, I do
not know. It feels just nothing at all. It is not Hell, certainly it is
not necessarily Heaven. So I suppose it is the intermediate stage.
What do they call it? Limbo. No, I feel nothing at all about that.
They are dead; they have gone before their Judge who, I hope,
will open to them the springs of His compassion. It is not my
business to think about it. It is simply my business to say, as
Leonora's people say: "Requiem aeternam dona eis, Do mine, et
lux perpetua luceat eis. In memoria aeterna erit. . . ." But what
were they? The just? The unjust? God knows! I think that the pair
of them were only poor wretches, creeping over this earth in the
shadow of an eternal wrath. It is very terrible. . . .

It is almost too terrible, the picture of that judgement, as it appears
to me sometimes, at nights. It is probably the suggestion of some
picture that I have seen somewhere. But upon an immense plain,
suspended in mid-air, I seem to see three figures, two of them
clasped close in an intense embrace, and one intolerably solitary.
lt is in black and white, my picture of that judgement, an etching,
perhaps; only I cannot tell an etching from a photographic
reproduction. And the immense plain is the hand of God,
stretching out for miles and miles, with great spaces above it and
below it. And they are in the sight of God, and it is Florence that
is alone. . . . And, do you know, at the thought of that intense
solitude I feel an overwhelming desire to rush forward and