They discussed, too, Carman and Wade Powell. Marley thought that Lavinia might return to her old severity with Powell; when he expected her to do this, he was preparing to defend Powell; when she did not, but was generous with him, and urged Marley to reflect that he had done all he had done out of a spirit of kindness, Marley was disposed to be severe with Powell himself. Carman, they agreed, had acted handsomely; they could not find cause to blame him.
“No,” said Marley, “he treated me all right; I believe he was really sorry for me.”
And then, at the thought of Carman’s having pity for him, his rebellion flamed up again.
“It’s humiliating, that’s what it is. Wade Powell had no business making a monkey of me in that way; though it doesn’t take much to make a monkey of me; I had the job almost completed myself, just waiting for some one to come along and put the finishing touches on. And Wade Powell did that!”
Marley spoke in the sardonic humor the wounded and beaten spirit likes to employ in dealing with itself. But Lavinia hushed him.
“You just can not talk that way about yourself, Glenn,” she declared with her finest air of ownership. “I won’t let you.”
“Well, it’s so humiliating,” he said.
“Why, no, it can’t be that,” Lavinia argued. “You can not feel humiliated. You have done nothing that need cause you any humiliation. We are the only ones who can humiliate ourselves; nothing but our own actions can humiliate us; no one else can.”
Lavinia had a smiling little triumph in her own philosophy, but she quickly compromised it by an inconsistency.
“Besides, no one else knows about it.”