'----That you offered me food,' he continues steadily. 'But it's like you and yours to make light of it. You've never done me any good! Why, you're George's mother, and you brought him into the world! And I owe him more than my life--ay, more than my life!'
'I know the friendship there was between you and George,' she says, setting the strength of his words to that account, 'and that George loved you like a brother. More's the pity, because of that, that you are as you are.'
'It is so,' he assents meekly; 'but the milk's spilt; I can't pick it up again.'
'Saul, Saul! you talk like a woman!'
'Do I?' he asks tenderly, and looking into her face with respect and esteem in his eyes. 'Then there's some good left in me. I know one who is stronger than I am, better, wiser, than a hundred such as I--and I showed my appreciation of her goodness and her worth by doing her wrong. Show my face like a man! I ought to hide it, as the moles do, and show my contempt for myself by flying from the sight of men!'
Filled with compassion, she turns her face from him so that she may not witness his grief.
'She is the noblest, the best of women!' he continues. 'In the face of God, I say it. Standing here, with His light shining upon me, with His keen wind piercing me to my bones (but it is just!), I bow to her, although I see her not, as the nearest approach to perfect goodness which it has ever been my happiness and my unhappiness to come in contact with. Ay; although virtue, as humanly exercised, would turn its back upon her.'
'Are you blaming the world, Saul Fielding,' she asks, in a tone that has a touch of sternness in it, 'for a fault which is all your own?'
'No,' he answers; 'I am justifying Jane. I blame the world! a pretty object I, to turn accuser!'
He appeals to his rags, in scorn of them and of himself.