The bitterness of this thrust, to which experience had given a barbed point, made him wince.
“She is only a child,” said he; “feeling my love about her day by day, she will learn to be happy in that, as you would have been if your husband had been all your heart wanted,” he added, as a happy thought.
But Chloris White only laughed, having the coarse cynical honesty of her kind. “Do you really believe that?” she said. “Well, you are wrong. In my case, because no one man could ever have been to me all my heart wanted; in Nouna’s case, because she is, disguise it what way you like, her mother’s child. Give her jewels, new gowns, gaiety, luxury, and you may hold what room there is in her heart for a man; shut her in two rooms, restrict her to one frock for each of the seasons, and you will see, if you don’t know, just how much happiness your love is able to give her. I tell you she must have pleasure, pleasure, pleasure; and if you won’t let her accept it openly, passing through your hands as a gift from you, I’ll let her have it secretly through somebody else’s.”
A spirit of evil seemed to flash a hideous lightning across her handsome face as she uttered this threat. George was horrorstruck.
“You don’t mean what you say,” he said, catching his breath. “You, who were noble enough to keep apart from your child for her sake! You would not destroy your own work now!”
“I would destroy anything when I’m worked up to it,” she said coolly. “Listen, Mr. Lauriston. The world makes distinctions as to the ways in which money is made; but it makes none as to the way in which it is spent; that can and does confer nothing but honour. Well, that part of the business is all I ask of you. As to the way I get it, why many a man of your trade might think himself blessed if he got his with so clear a conscience. There are no villages burned to give me a cocked hat, nor towns plundered that I may build a villa. My money’s my own, to do what I like with, and I choose to give it to my children to make them a position in the world. Nobody knows where it comes from, and nobody need know; and you can call it your wife’s money, not yours, if you are so particular. But she must and shall have it. Money is not made by looking at it by me more than by anybody else. I’ve worked for a fortune to give my daughter, because I mean her to have the best of everything in this world. I’m ready even never to see her except by a trick, but I won’t have my work foiled just at the last by any squeamish folly on your part; if you won’t have wife and fortune together, you shall have neither, I swear.”
“You don’t seem to understand, madam, that your control over your daughter ceased when she became my wife.”
“Did it?” retorted Chloris White, with scornful emphasis. “Well, you can entertain that opinion, if it comforts you, for a few days longer. But don’t depend too much on your legal rights when you are dealing with a person who lives outside the law.”
“I can trust your love for Nouna to conquer any impulse you might have to do her harm through me,” said George, a bull-dog defiance rising in him and affecting the tone in which he uttered these sufficiently pacific words.
“You can trust me to keep her from having her life ruined by any man’s pig-headedness,” said Chloris, throwing herself into a long cane lounging chair with much spirit in voice and attitude. “Do you think I brought up Nouna virtuously to secure her happiness?” she asked mockingly. “No, I meant her to be happy in spite of it. I meant her to enjoy all the honours of the great world, and all the luxury of the other one; I meant her to become what she has become, a society pet, a society lion, by the very ways and manners which in me are Bohemian, shocking, impossible. Oh! They are easily gulled, those feather-brained ladies of the ‘best’ society. However, it is ‘the best,’ and so I mean my daughter to keep there.”