"Will you please stop, Lady Herbert?" Ghisleri fixed his blue eyes on her.
"No, I will not," answered Laura, with decision. "What I like about you is precisely what you try the most to hide, and I mean to see it and to make you see it, if possible. You would be much happier if you could. I suppose that if the majority of people could hear us talking now, they would think our conversation utterly absurd. They would say that you were posing, in order to make yourself interesting, and that I was enough attracted by you to be deceived by the comedy. Is not that the way the world would look at it?"
"Probably," assented Ghisleri. "Perhaps I am really posing. I do not pretend to know."
"I am willing to believe that you are not, if you will let me, and I would much rather. In the first place, you are, at all events, not any worse than most men one knows. That is evident enough from your actions. Secondly,—you see I am arguing the case like a lawyer,—if you had not a high ideal of what you wish to be, you would not have such a poor opinion of what you are. Is that clear?"
"If there were no right, there could not possibly be any wrong. But black would be black, even if you could only compare it with blue, green, and yellow, instead of with white."
"I am not talking of chromolithographs," said Laura. "What I say is simple enough. If you did not wish to be good, and know what good means, and if you had not a certain amount of goodness in you, you would not think yourself so bad. And you are unhappy, as you have told me before now, because you think all your motives are insincere, or vain, or defective in some way. I suppose you wish to be happy, and if you do, you must learn to find some satisfaction in having done your best. I have said precisely what I mean, and you must not pretend to misunderstand me."
"Think yourself good, and you will be happy," observed Ghisleri. "That is the modern form of the proverb."
"Of course it is, and the better reason you really have for thinking yourself good, the more real and lasting your happiness will be."
Ghisleri laughed to himself, and at himself, as he went away, for being so much impressed as he was by what Laura said. But he could not deny that the impression had been made and remained for some time after he had left her. There was a healthy common-sense about her mind which was beginning to act upon the tortuous and often morbid complications of his own. She seemed to know the straight paths and the short cuts to simple goodness, and never to have guessed at the labyrinthine ways by which he seemed to himself to be always trying to escape from the bugbear sent to pursue him by the demon of self-mistrust. He laughed at himself, for he realised how utterly impossible it would always be for him to think as she did, or to look upon the world as she saw it. There had been a time when he had thought more plainly, when a woman had exerted a strong influence over him, and when a few good things and a few bad ones had made up the sum of his life. But she was dead, and he had changed. Worse than that, he had fallen. As he sat in his room and glanced from time to time at the only likeness he had of Bianca Corleone, he thought of Beatrice's reproach to Dante in the thirty-first canto of the "Purgatory":
"And yet, because thou'rt shamed of me in all
Thy sin, and that in later days to come
Thou mayst be brave, hearing the Siren's voice
Sow deep the seed of tears and hear me speak.
So shalt thou know how thou should'st have been moved
By my dead body in ways opposite.
Nor art nor nature had the power to tempt thee
With such delight as that fair body could
In which I lived—which now is scattered earth—
And if the highest joy was lost to thee
By my young death, what mortal living thing
Should have had strength to drag thee down with it?"