This would explain--"
Cyrus Pym was standing up rigid and almost pallid.
"Do you actually mean to suggest--" he cried.
"Yes," said Michael; "I do mean to suggest that. Innocent Smith has had
many wooings, and many weddings for all I know; but he has had only one wife.
She was sitting on that chair an hour ago, and is now talking to Miss Duke
in the garden.
"Yes, Innocent Smith has behaved here, as he has on hundreds of
other occasions, upon a plain and perfectly blameless principle.
It is odd and extravagant in the modern world, but not more than any other
principle plainly applied in the modern world would be. His principle
can be quite simply stated: he refuses to die while he is still alive.
He seeks to remind himself, by every electric shock to the intellect,
that he is still a man alive, walking on two legs about the world.
For this reason he fires bullets at his best friends; for this reason
he arranges ladders and collapsible chimneys to steal his own property;
for this reason he goes plodding around a whole planet to get back to his
own home; and for this reason he has been in the habit of taking the woman
whom he loved with a permanent loyalty, and leaving her about (so to speak)
at schools, boarding-houses, and places of business, so that he might
recover her again and again with a raid and a romantic elopement.
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