"That may be your misfortune," rejoined she sadly, "but I fear it is your fault."
"The sin of a thing," he said, putting down his brushes impatiently, "oftener consists in regarding it as a sin than in the thing itself."
He went to the round window, for his studio was high up in the building, and removed the Japanese umbrella which served as its screen. He threw himself upon a pile of cushions, regarding darkly the tops of the trees in the Old Granary burying-ground opposite.
"Que voulez-vous?" he demanded coolly, after a moment's silence. "You are unreasonable; you always are. I must live. I don't know why you have a right to object to that. I have married a wife who is well connected, and I always meant to make her connections help me, Philistines or not. Even the godly Israelites made a virtue of spoiling the Egyptians."
"But that was in departing from their country."
"We won't argue," the artist declared sulkily. "Argument is only disputing about definitions, and we should never agree. I don't expect you to think I'm right. As a matter of fact I have my doubts myself. You might at least allow me the satisfaction of humbugging myself if I am able."
She regarded him sadly. The chance remarks about Edith's relatives seemed to throw a new and sinister light upon the reasons of his marriage. She wondered if she had not been mistaken in following her impulse to come here, and whether words could effect any thing.
"But Edith?" she said at length, and as if half to herself; "does not her honesty rebuke you? Don't you feel unworthy of her?"
"Well, and if her severe virtue does repel me?" he asked, a hard look coming into his face, "am I to blame for that also?"
"You are speaking of your wife!"