"By degrees, however," she continued, "everything grew irksome; and a horrid weariness and sense of degradation stole over me; not because I loved wealth and luxury any less, but because of the price I had to pay for it. And you had made it dearer to buy, for you had gone away."
"Yes," he said, "I had gone away; and you would have liked to have me stay, and be experimented on, and victimized for your delight,--I can understand that; but I should have fancied, Mrs. Hammond, you knew me too well to suppose you could have played such a game as that with me."
"I would not have played any game with you," she said--not angrily, rather sadly. "How unjust you are! how unjust men always are! they--"
He interrupted her. "Pray do not indulge me--with that senseless complaint which women who, like you, are the bane and the torment of men who loved them with an honest, and the utter ruin of men who loved them with a dishonest love, make of their victims. I have long ceased to be yours, Mrs. Hammond; but I am not unjust. I say again, you would have made me ridiculous as readily as you had made me wretched. I don't deny it, you see. I am much astonished, and rather ashamed, when forced to remember it; but I am not weak enough to deny a weakness. To be so would argue that it is not entirely corrected."
He was provoking her to anger, but not altogether unintentionally; his best means of coming at her real purpose would be by throwing her off her guard.
"I say again," she repeated, "you are unjust; I would not have played any such game. I would have become used to my position in time; I would have seen you in the world; I would have seen you gradually forgetting me. It would not have been our angry parting, and a dead dull blank,--time to feel to the utmost all the horrors of a marriage without love. No woman, I believe, would sell herself, at least in marriage, which must last, if she could estimate them aright. And then such a meeting as ours! Do you remember it, Laurence?" She stole a very affectionate look at him here.
"Yes, I remember it," he said shortly.
"A horrid interview we had then, full of sneers and bitterness on your side, and not in the least real on mine."
"Is this a pleasanter one, Mrs. Hammond?" said Sir Laurence, who perceived that her levity was coming up again, and desired to suppress it. "I cannot perceive the utility of this retrospect."
"I daresay not," she answered coolly; "but I do." The pretty air of command was entirely lost on Alsager. She saw that it was, and ground her teeth,--a pleasant symptom of passion which she never could suppress. "By the time we met again," she continued, "I was sick and weary--not only of the price I had to pay for the wealth I had bought, but of the wealth itself. Of course I never changed my opinion of the value of money. I don't mean that; but I did not get as much out of the wealth I had purchased as I might have done. I was very much admired, and quite the fashion, but somehow I tired of it all; and then--then, Laurence, I found out why. I found out that I really had more heart than I believed, and that it was in your keeping."