“How does she suffer? She is received everywhere, made a fuss with, treated as a lion, as if she were descended from the skies. Would it improve her position for it to be known that her mother had been divorced, legally or illegally? What better provision could I, a poor man, make for her than I do, if she were my acknowledged legitimate daughter?”
“Provision!”
“Yes, I allow her a thousand a year, supposed to have been left her. Why not? She is under no obligation, and I——”
“—Will be relieved from the charge for the future. I guessed something of it this morning, of course, and was only anxious to know how much we owed you.”
“Owed me! It is not a debt. I acknowledge, I am the first to acknowledge, the claims of my own child, especially now she is your wife.”
“Oh, I acknowledge the claims too. It is only my pride that makes me waive them on behalf of my wife. Until I know all the circumstances of the case I prefer to stand independently.”
“Why, what further circumstances do you want to know?”
“There are two more versions of the story I must hear before I can understand all its bearings. You understand, Colonel, that where a woman is concerned, the man’s view of the question is not enough to judge by. I must hear Sundran and Madame di Valdestillas.”
“Hear every hag in —— if you please,” said the Colonel irritably. “Only I warn you it is foolish behaviour rattling the bones of decently buried skeletons.”
“If it were only an old scandal I shouldn’t care,” said George with a deepening of the collected gravity he had shown all through the conversation. “But you must see, Colonel, that the whole course of our lives depends on the following into its corners of this wretched story. My wife and I, starting quietly in a humdrum way, a pair of very poor town-mice, suddenly find ourselves in a Tom Tiddler’s ground, and are bidden not to trouble ourselves how we came there, or why we are inundated with invitations, and our eccentricities treated as delightful innovations, when a few weeks before they would have been ‘bad style.’ It isn’t in human nature not to ask why.”