It might be the identical spot where Ophelia was drowned.”
“I wonder if it is,” she said diverted for a minute from her own anxieties. “Poor Ophelia! Somehow I have never cared for acting that part of late years. You spoiled me for all other Hamlets. I have often wondered since, Hugh, how you contrived to get through that last season in London.”
“Well it was a rough time,” said Macneillie, “for, like the Danish Prince,
‘In my heart there was a kind of fighting
That would not let me sleep.’
By the end of the season I was as nearly mad as Hamlet feigned to be. But no more of that. It is of the present we must talk not of the past. How can I help you? Has anyone been molesting you?”
“Yes,” she faltered. “I will tell you all, and then you will understand.”
So in her musical voice, and with that extraordinary charm of manner which made her irresistible, she told him simply and truthfully all the difficulties she had had to contend with. Lastly she told him of Conway Sartoris and of the arguments he had used in his letter.
“They seem to me quite unanswerable,” she said, “and he is a man everyone respects, he is far more intellectual than we are, and he doesn’t merely theorise, he knows the difficulties of real life. The more I think of it, the more it seems to me that you and I are wrecking our lives and suffering so cruelly all for a mistaken idea,—a sort of fetish-worship for the law of the land.”
Macneillie had grown very pale, his hands trembled, but from long force of habit his voice was well under control.