The Little Fool

Summary

A porcelain-pretty Edwardian manor quakes when an armchair philosopher-husband, Richard Forrest, treats wedlock like a gentleman’s wager: he will not coddle his wife’s affections; she must solder them herself. Into this glass-house of theories strides his penniless novelist confidant, all ink-stained ardor, who promptly kneels at the lady’s silk hem and confesses his trespass to the cuckold like a schoolboy handing in contraband. Forrest responds with a laconic chuckle, flinging open the cage door—‘If she flies, she was never mine.’ The wife flutters, tastes the author’s trembling kiss, then confronts the chasm between a paper passion and the granite quiet of the man who already owns her marrow. In the end she does not crawl back; she pivots, unprompted, magnetized to the hush of certitude she finds in her husband’s gaze, proving that the strongest chains are the invisible ones we volunteer to wear.

Synopsis

Richard Forrest's philosophy of marital relations is that it is not up to the husband to hold his wife's love but that she should "hold it herself." His theories are put to a practical test when his best friend, a young author, comes to the Big House. The friend falls in love with the wife and frankly tells her husband of the fact, saying that it is best that he go away. Forrest laughs at him and states that his wife should know her own mind and she is free to love whom she chooses and that if she finds she loves the author she is free to go away with him. But the thing that he thought would not take place did happen finally. The wife thinks she is in love with the author and tells her husband that she has allowed the other man to kiss her. She finds out in the end, however, that her husband's character is of such strength that she "holds herself" to him, and reaches the conclusion that her love for the author was but a temporary affair.