"But surely your husband——"
"Oh, he has not even constancy to commend him; he does not even conceal his preferences. He is always receiving letters from some woman—some old friend, he tells me—calling him to London for an hour, or a day, as the case may be, and no matter what plans I may have made, he goes."
"You know her name?"
"She signs her Christian name only—no wonder—but I have her letters and I'll find her out."
"And when you've found her, what then? Will you plead with her?"
"I?" she cried. "I, a De Costa, degrade myself by pleading with a woman of that class!"
The Secretary shrugged his shoulders.
"I think every woman," he said, "has some good in her, low as she may be, some spark of longing for better things, some element of self-respect that never quite dies out."
"You're right," she admitted. "A man is by nature a brute. A woman, even at her worst, is not quite that. Some extra spark of divinity seems to have been given her in compensation for her weakness."
"I believe no woman is wholly bad," said the Secretary. "The worst women of history have, at some moments in their lives, been very near redemption."