But, on the whole, Mrs. Sterne's conduct seems by her husband's own
admissions to have been not wanting in dignity.

As to the nature of Sterne's love-affairs I have come, though not
without hesitation, to the conclusion that they were most, if not all
of them, what is called, somewhat absurdly, Platonic. In saying this,
however, I am by no means prepared to assert that they would all of
them have passed muster before a prosaic and unsentimental British
jury as mere indiscretions, and nothing worse. Sterne's relations
with Miss Fourmantelle, for instance, assumed at last a profoundly
compromising character, and it is far from improbable that the worst
construction would have been put upon them by one of the plain-dealing
tribunals aforesaid. Certainly a young woman who leaves her mother at
York, and comes up to London to reside alone in lodgings, where she is
constantly being visited by a lover who is himself living _en garçon_
in the metropolis, can hardly complain if her imprudence is fatal to
her reputation; neither can he if his own suffers in the same way.
But, as I am not of those who hold that the conventionally "innocent"
is the equivalent of the morally harmless in this matter, I cannot
regard the question as worth any very minute investigation. I am
not sure that the habitual male flirt, who neglects his wife to sit
continually languishing at the feet of some other woman, gives much
less pain and scandal to others, or does much less mischief to himself
and the objects of his adoration, than the thorough-going profligate;
and I even feel tempted to risk the apparent paradox that, from
the artistic point of view, Sterne lost rather than gained by the
generally Platonic character of his amours. For, as it was, the
restraint of one instinct of his nature implied the over-indulgence
of another which stood in at least as much need of chastenment. If his
love-affairs stopped short of the gratification of the senses, they