HE. Why not? I don't understand.

HER HUSBAND. Come! Don't underrate your own cleverness, Apjohn. I
think you understand pretty well.

HE. I assure you I am quite at a loss. Can you not be a little
more explicit?

HER HUSBAND. Don't overdo it, old chap. However, I will just be
so far explicit as to say that if you think these poems read as
if they were addressed, not to a live woman, but to a shivering
cold time of day at which you were never out of bed in your life,
you hardly do justice to your own literary powers--which I admire
and appreciate, mind you, as much as any man. Come! own up. You
wrote those poems to my wife. [An internal struggle prevents
Henry from answering]. Of course you did. [He throws the poems on
the table; and goes to the hearthrug, where he plants himself
solidly, chuckling a little and waiting for the next move].

HE [formally and carefully] Mr Bompas: I pledge you my word you
are mistaken. I need not tell you that Mrs Bompas is a lady of
stainless honor, who has never cast an unworthy thought on me.
The fact that she has shown you my poems--

HER HUSBAND. That's not a fact. I came by them without her
knowledge. She didn't show them to me.

HE. Does not that prove their perfect innocence? She would have
shown them to you at once if she had taken your quite unfounded
view of them.