“If you’ve any excuse to make for your behaviour,” said Miss Blow, “make it. I shall listen to you.”
“I haven’t,” said Lord Manton. “Not a shred. Nor has Mr. Goddard. Don’t interrupt me, Goddard. You haven’t any real excuse, and you know it. But you mustn’t be too hard upon us, Miss Blow. Try to put yourself in our position, in Mr. Goddard’s position, for I really haven’t anything to do with the business one way or other. It wasn’t his fault about those Members of Parliament. He’s just as sorry about it as anybody else. If he’d known that they intended to run away from their wives he’d have stopped them; but how could he know?”
“Oh!” said Miss Blow. “That is the latest theory, is it? Their husbands ran away from them? Do you expect to get any one to believe that? I suppose the husband of that poor woman down in the village ran away from her. I suppose you mean to try and prove that she ill-treated him, that she, a half-starved, delicate woman, bullied a great hulking blacksmith. I suppose you’ll say that Dr. O’Grady ran away from me. Last time I was here you said he ran away from his creditors. When I proved that to be a lie, you have the assurance to say that he ran away from me.”
“I hadn’t mentioned you or Dr. O’Grady,” said Lord Manton. “But come now, Miss Blow, be reasonable. If he has run away from you, he wouldn’t be the only man that has. You can’t deny that Mr. Goddard ran away from you. He did it twice. You said so yourself. In fact, you more than hinted that he was in the act of a third flight when you caught him. There’s nothing inherently absurd in supposing that one man would do what another man has done several times. I needn’t say I wouldn’t do it myself. But that’s another matter. It’s far better for you to look facts straight in the face, however unpleasant they are.”
Whether Miss Blow looked at the facts or not, the facts as Lord Manton represented them, she certainly looked at Mr. Goddard. It seemed for a moment as if she was about to re-open the question of his flight to Ballymoy and his subsequent flight back again to Clonmore. He felt greatly annoyed with Lord Manton for calling fresh attention to these performances. There ought, he was convinced, to be some limit to the extent to which a man may give away his friends. But Miss Blow recognized that these hurried flittings of his and the causes of them were side issues. She got back, with an evident effort, to the main point immediately under discussion.
“And why should you suppose that the husbands of the ladies you have shut up in your drawing-room have run away from them?”
It was of Lord Manton that she asked the question; but Mr. Goddard answered her. He saw his opportunity and seized it. Having been sacrificed more than once as a burnt-offering to Miss Blow’s wrath, he was perfectly ready, now he got the chance, to show up Lord Manton, as a man who also deserved strong denunciation.
“Lord Manton says,” said Mr. Goddard, “that their husbands couldn’t bear to live with them any more, because they were ordinary women and——”
“As well as I recollect,” said Lord Manton, “it was you who used the word ‘ordinary.’ I hadn’t seen the ladies at the time. For that matter, I haven’t seen them yet.”
“And,” said Mr. Goddard, speaking slowly and with emphasis, “because they wear red dressing-gowns and wash their teeth.”