“What does it mean? What does a life like that mean?” Her eyes, in all their helpless guilt and terror, met his look of non-absolving pity.
“It means that if one is good one is often trodden upon. We must accept the responsibility for Mary’s unhappiness. My poor Camelia,” Perior added, in tones of saddest comprehension, and he stretched out his hand to her. But Camelia stood still.
“Accept it!” she cried, and her voice was sharp with the repressed scream. “Do you think I am trying to shirk it? Do you think that I do not see that it is I—I, who trod upon her? Don’t say ‘We’; say ‘You,’ as you think it. You need have no compunctions. I could have made her happy—happier, at least, and I have made her miserable. I have done—said—looked the cruellest things—confiding in her stupid insensibility. I have crushed her year after year. I am worse than a murderer. Don’t talk of me—even to accuse me; don’t think of me, but think of her. Oh, Michael! let us think of her! Help me to mend—a little—the end of it all!”
“Mend it?” He looked at her, taken aback by her words, the strange insistence of her eyes. “One can’t, Camelia—one can’t atone for those things.”
“Then you mean to say that life is the horror she sees it to be? She sees it! There is the pity—the awful pity of it! Not even a merciful blindness, not even the indifference of weakness! Morality is a gibe then? Goodness goes for nothing—is trampled in the mud by the herd of apes snatching for themselves! That is the world, then!” The fierce scorn of her voice claimed him as umpire. Perior put his hand to his head with a gesture of discouragement.
“That is the world—as far as we can see it.”
“And there is no hope? no redemption?”
“Not unless we make it ourselves—not unless the ape loses his characteristics.” He paused, and a deepened pity entered his voice as he added, “You have lost them, Camelia.”
“Yes; I can hear the canting moralist now, with his noisome explanation of vice and misery. Mary has been sacrificed to save my soul, forsooth! My soul!”
“Yes.” Perior’s monosyllable held neither assent nor repudiation.