"But you could not prevent the women hounding her, and upon my honor, Robert, she would deserve it."
"No, David. She would not deserve it."
"I say she would."
"What for?"
"For coming back with you. Every woman with a particle of self-respect would feel that she had betrayed her sex, and dishonored her wifehood, and they would despise, and speak ill of her for doing so. And she would deserve it."
"Then all this month you have been expecting me to come here to live?"
"There was no other manly and gentlemanly way out of your dilemma; and your coming at all authorized the expectation."
"The iron works are not all, David. Do you think I care nothing for my family, and my country?"
"Do you think you are the only person who cares for their family? What about Theodora's feelings? Her father gave up his ministry, and taking his wife and the savings of his whole life, he came here to the ends of the earth with his child, because you had treated her and her son cruelly. Now you ask her to leave them here, in a new country, where they have not one relative—in their old age——"
"I forgot their claim. I will pay all their expenses back to England."