"I could make you so by taking you out of it. You are too good for it all, too good to sit and pour out tea for—for the sort of people who come here."
"Do you mean," she asked, with a touch of scorn in her voice, "that we are not respectable?"
"That is not you who speak," he persisted; "it is your aunt who speaks through you. I know it is the fashion now to cry out against one, even in good society, to call one straitlaced, if one respects certain conventions. There are some I respect profoundly; and not the least that one which forbids right-minded gentlewomen to receive men of notoriously disgraceful lives. One should draw the line; one should draw it at that Hungarian pianist who was here this afternoon. Your aunt, of course, is a Frenchwoman; she has different ideas. But you, I can't believe that you care for this society, for people like Kronopolski and—and Rainham. Oh, it hurts me, and I imagine how distasteful it must be to you, that you must suffer these people. I want to take you away from it all."
The girl had risen, flushing a little. She replied haughtily, with a vibration of passion in her voice:
"You are not generous, Mr. Sylvester. You are not even just. What right have I ever given you to dictate to me whom I shall know or refuse to know? I, too, have my convictions; and I think your view is narrow, and uncharitable, and false. You see, we don't agree enough…. Ah, let it end, Mr. Sylvester!" She went on more gently, but very tiredly, her pale face revealing how the interview had strained her: "I wish you all the good in the world, but I can't marry you. Let us shake hands on that, and say good-bye."
Sylvester had also risen to his feet, and he stood facing her for a moment indecisively, as though he hardly credited the finality of his rejection.
They were still in this attitude, and the fact gave a certain tinge of embarrassment to their greetings, when the door opened, and Mrs. Lightmark was announced.
"I was on the point of going," explained Charles nervously. "I thought you were not coming, you know."
Eve made no effort to detain him, half suspecting that she had appeared at a strenuous moment. When the barrister had departed (Mary had just extended to him the tips of her frigid fingers), and Eve's polite inquiries after Lady Garnett's health had been satisfied, she remarked:
"I really only came in for a cup of tea. I walked across from Dorset Square. I have sent the carriage to pick up my husband at his club: it's coming back for me. You look tired, Mary. I think I oughtn't to stay. You look as if you had been having a political afternoon. Poor Charles, since he has been in the House, can think of nothing but blue-books."