Gladys turned her face to the fire, and kept it so turned. ‘I am rather sorry,’ she said at length, and sighed.
‘You are sorry? Indeed!’
‘Yes, Lady Bligh, and disappointed too; for I’d been hoping to find you’d been ever so much beneath Sir James. Don’t you see, if you had been ever so much beneath him, you aren’t a bit now; and it would have proved that the wife can become what the husband is, if she isn’t that to begin with—and if she tries hard. No—you mustn’t interrupt unless it’s to send me away. I want you to suppose a case. Look back, and imagine that your own case was the opposite to what it really was. That Sir James was of a very good family. That you were not only not that, but were stupid and ignorant, and a worse thing—vulgar. That you had lived your rough life in another country; so that when he brought you to England as his wife, your head was full of nothing but that other country, which nobody wanted to know anything about. That you couldn’t even talk like other people, but gave offence, not only without meaning to, but without knowing how. That——’
Lady Bligh could hear no more. ‘Oh, Gladys!’ she exclaimed in a voice of pain, ‘you are not thinking of yourself?’
‘That’s a question! Still, as it’s your first, I don’t mind telling you you’ve hit it, Lady Bligh. I am thinking of myself. But you must let me finish. Suppose—to make short work of it—that you had been me, what would you have done to get different, like?’
‘My poor child! I cannot bear to hear you talk like this!’
‘Nonsense, Lady Bligh. I want you to tell me how you’d have gone about it—you know what I mean.’
‘I can’t tell you, Gladys; I can’t indeed!’
‘What! Can’t tell me what you would have done—what I ought to do?’
‘I cannot!’ Lady Bligh commanded her voice with difficulty. ‘I cannot!’