“And—I wouldn’t have you different from what you are. You are a certain kind of human being—my kind—the kind I admire through and through—yes, through and through. And—you are the only one of the kind in all this world, so far as I have seen. I don’t care by what processes you became what you are. You say you love me for the battles I’ve lost. Honestly, would you like to hear, even like to have me tell you, in detail, all that I’ve been through? Aren’t you better satisfied just to know the results?”
“Yes,” she admitted, and she remembered how she had hated Marguerite Feronia that day at the Astor House, how she never saw a lithograph of her staring from a dead wall or a bill board or a shop window that she did not have a pang.
“Then how can you blame me?” he urged.
“I—I guess—I don’t,” she said with a little smile.
“But I blame myself,” he went on. “I—yes, I, the immaculate, arraigned you at the bar for trial and——”
“Found me guilty and recommended me to the mercy of the court?”
“No—not quite so bad as that,” he replied. “But don’t think I’m not conscious of the colossal impudence of the performance—one human being sitting in judgment on another!”
“It’s done every minute,” she said cheerfully. “And we make good judges of each other. All we have to do is to look inside ourselves, and we don’t need to listen to the evidence before saying ‘Guilty.’ But what was the verdict at my trial?”
“It hadn’t gone very far before we changed places—you became the accuser and I went into the prisoner’s pen. And I could only plead guilty to the basest form of that base passion, jealousy. I couldn’t deny that you were noble and good, that it was unthinkable that you could be guilty of anything low. I was compelled to admit that if you had been—married—”
“Was any evidence admitted on that point?” she asked with a sly smile at the corners of her mouth.