"Give me an example."
"I credit you with honesty, while you cry me down as a bad woman."
"Pardon me. I do not say that you are bad. Misguided, rather."
"And why--according to your lights? Because I do not put up Jim as a pig-idol, to worship with crocodile tears?"
She silenced Kaimes for the moment, as there was much truth in her overstated contention. No decent woman could have loved or honoured the dead man; and this outspoken condemnation, provable in the main, was assuredly more honest than pretended laudation and sham sorrow would have been. Yet the merciless indictment jarred on Lionel's sense of propriety, righteous as he knew it to be.
"The man is dead," said he, testily; "leave him to God."
Leah held her peace. It annoyed the ordinarily self-possessed woman, that for one fierce moment emotion should have overleaped judgment. Reining in her passions, she relapsed into the sober jog-trot necessary on the rutted road of conventionality. But Lionel's final speech provoked a laugh. Would his laudation of the dead, she wondered, change to criticism of the living, did he learn the truth? Feminine desire for the last word would have blurted out this final argument, but that an innate masculine discretion recommended silence. Therefore did she compromise with the laugh, which Lionel, misunderstanding, resented with the warmth of a generous nature.
"That is positively cruel," said he, indignantly.
"Very human, I think," said Lady Jim, yawning away the reaction.
Following his own line of thought, the curate did not traverse this statement. "A woman can make of a man what she pleases."