He glanced at Lord Manton with an expression of triumph on his face. Miss Blow stared first at one of the men before her and then at the other. She was amazed. In spite of the white heat of her virtuous indignation she was reduced for the moment to a silence of sheer astonishment. The nature of the charge brought against the wives of the Members of Parliament took her aback. It was totally unexpected.
“Those,” said Mr. Goddard, striking home after his victory, “are the exact expressions Lord Manton used.”
“Of course,” said Lord Manton, in an explanatory and half-apologetic tone, “I didn’t mean to suggest that those were Patsy Devlin’s reasons for absconding. I don’t suppose that his wife has a dressing-gown of any colour, and as for her teeth——”
Miss Blow began to recover a little from her first shock.
“Do you mean to say,” she said, “that you consider a man is justified in deserting his wife because she wears a red dressing-gown and washes her teeth?”
“Certainly,” said Lord Manton. “If you consider the matter fairly and impartially, without bias in favour of either sex, you will see that there can’t be two opinions about it. The mere act of wearing a dressing-gown, red or blue, is of course nothing in itself. But considered as an expression of a certain spirit, of what I may perhaps call the spirit of persistent, puritanical domesticity; regarded as an evidence of an oppressive kind of civilized respectability, taken in conjunction with a whole series of trifling, or apparently trifling, mental and physical habits,—ordering dinner, for instance, engaging servants, doing needlework, paying weekly bills, keeping a visiting list, taking a holiday every year at the seaside—you will, I am sure, understand the sort of things I mean—taken in conjunction with these and regarded as an expression of the kind of spirit which takes a delight in doing these things and doing them continuously year after year—considered in this way, the wearing of a red dressing-gown does justify a man, a certain sort of man, in deserting his wife. You catch my meaning, I am sure, Miss Blow.”
Once more Miss Blow was silent from sheer astonishment. Then, after a pause, she spoke, and Mr. Goddard, like the governor Felix before the Apostle Paul, trembled. Lord Manton, although it was to him that her remark was specially addressed, bore himself more bravely.
“You think it very fine,” she said, “to bully and badger a helpless girl, and to allow innocent men to be murdered under your very eyes. But you’ll have to answer for it. You’ll be held responsible, both of you. It’s—it’s intolerable.”
“My dear Miss Blow,” said Lord Manton.
“Don’t dare to say ‘my dear’ to me.”