<div>Edward Craddock is a thoroughly good man. He may lack his wife Bertha’s education, but he is unfailingly good-humored, handsome, placid, and popular. It is hardly surprising that Bertha adores him. But expending all one’s passion, all one’s spirit, on a man who is so undemonstrative, so unimaginative, can be very trying, as Bertha soon discovers.<br><br>In this penetrating study of an unequal marriage, W. Somerset Maugham explores the nature of love and happiness and finds that the two rarely coincide.<br><br>There is something bracing about the sincerity of [Maugham's] style . . . a style that serves his general purpose of stripping life to the bone with a thin, sharp knife that lays open to view the normal flesh and the healthy flow of blood as well as the cancerous sore beneath.” Leslie A. Marchand, <i>The New York Times</i></div>