“Yes, I married for money and position. What would you have had me do?” She made the quick question a reproach, speaking in a low, tense tone as of carefully restrained feeling, with a dash of personal defiance, paused and then added slowly: “I was deserted by—everyone. Was I to starve and sink and go on sinking and starving. The Baron was three times my age. Wealthy, and believed in me and trusted me. When even those who might have had faith in me”—she paused again as she repeated the phrase—“even those who might have had faith, turned their backs upon me, and deserted me, he offered me the shelter of his rank and riches and name. And even if I had no heart to give him in response, was I to blame for giving him my hand? Does it lie with you to reproach me?—you, of all men; you?”
So intense was her tone, so magnetic her influence, and so realistic her acting that she actually roused in me for the moment the feeling that in that old time it was I who had wronged her and played the part of coward now suggested, and not she who had cheated and cozened me in my boyish infatuation until for years my faith in all women had been destroyed. Yet I knew that she was that most dangerous of all created beings—a beautiful woman with brains and without a heart.
“I am not reproaching you,” I answered. “On the contrary, I congratulate you. I think you acted very prudently.”
“My God,” she cried in an accent of intense suffering; and first glancing at me with eyes full of sadness and suffering, she bent her head upon her hand. She was master of many emotions; but the acting which had fooled the boy in love was powerless to deceive me now.
A pause of some embarrassment followed. What I wished to learn was her motive in coming to me. She had a strong one, of course. I could gamble on that.
“Need we pretend?” I asked, at length.
She shivered as though the words hurt her, and then looking up suddenly, answered with a sort of fierce abandon.
“No. No; although God knows it is no pretence that I am agitated at seeing you again.”
“If you are thus disturbed let me suggest that we postpone the conversation until you are more self-possessed.”
She drew in her breath sharply with a little shudder, and stretched out a hand as if in entreaty, then clasped it to her face and appeared to make a great effort to regain self-restraint.