"I besought you three months ago to bear anything rather than quarrel with him."
"I have not quarrelled with him. It is he who has been always seeking a quarrel with me. I have borne a great deal—more than any one else would. He set his teeth against me from the first."
"He saw things that annoyed him; and men are not like women," said Mrs. Transome. There was bitter innuendo in that truism.
"It's very hard on me—I know that," said Jermyn, with an intensification of his previous tone, rising and walking a step or two, then turning and laying his hand on the back of the chair. "Of course the law in this case can't in the least represent the justice of the matter. I made a good many sacrifices in times past. I gave up a great deal of fine business for the sake of attending to the family affairs, and in that lawsuit they would have gone to rack and ruin if it hadn't been for me."
He moved away again, laid down his hat, which he had been previously holding, and thrust his hands into his pockets as he returned. Mrs. Transome sat motionless as marble, and almost as pale. Her hands lay crossed on her knees. This man, young, slim, and graceful, with a selfishness which then took the form of homage to her, had at one time kneeled to her and kissed those hands fervently, and she had thought there was a poetry in such passion beyond any to be found in everyday domesticity.
"I stretched my conscience a good deal in that affair of Bycliffe, as you know perfectly well. I told you everything at the time. I told you I was very uneasy about those witnesses, and about getting him thrown into prison. I know it's the blackest thing anybody could charge me with, if they knew my life from beginning to end; and I should never have done it, if I had not been under an infatuation such as makes a man do anything. What did it signify to me about the loss of the lawsuit? I was a young bachelor—I had the world before me."
"Yes," said Mrs. Transome, in a low tone. "It was a pity you didn't make another choice."
"What would have become of you?" said Jermyn, carried along a climax, like other self-justifiers. "I had to think of you. You would not have liked me to make another choice then."
"Clearly," said Mrs. Transome, with concentrated bitterness, but still quietly; "the greater mistake was mine."
Egoism is usually stupid in a dialogue; but Jermyn's did not make him so stupid that he did not feel the edge of Mrs. Transome's words. They increased his irritation.