There was a moment of silence which proved to both men the futility of further discussion.
"If you don't mind, I'd rather we didn't speak of this. Mrs. Wray would understand your viewpoint less clearly than I do. She is not familiar with vice, and she does not return my feeling for her. If she did, I should be the last person in the world she would see——"
"I can't believe you."
"It is the truth. Strange as it may seem to you and to me, she loves her husband."
"She married him for his money."
Cortland was silent. Memory suddenly pictured the schoolroom at Mesa City where he had won Camilla and lost her in the same unfortunate hour—his hour of mistakes, spiritual and material—a crucial hour in his life which he had met mistily, a slave of the caste which had bred him, a trifler in the sight of the only woman he could love, just as he had been a trifler before the world in letters and in business.
"No," he replied. "She did not marry him for money. She married him—for other reasons. She found those reasons sufficient then—she finds them sufficient now." He dropped heavily, with the air of a broken man, into an armchair, and put a hand over his eyes as though the light hurt them. "Don't try to influence me, sir. Let me think this out in my own way. Perhaps, after what you've told me about the Amalgamated, I ought to let you know."
"Speak to me freely, Cort," said the old man more kindly.
"I don't want you to think of Camilla as the wife of Jeff Wray. I want you to think of her as I think of her—as herself—as the girl I knew when I first went West, an English garden-rose growing alone in the heart of the desert. How she had taken root there Heaven only knows, but she had—and bloomed more tenderly because of the weeds that surrounded her."
He paused a moment and glanced at his father. General Bent had sunk deep in his chair, his shaggy brows hiding his deeply set eyes, which peered like those of a seer of visions into the dying embers before him. A spell seemed to have fallen over him. Cortland felt for the first time in his life that there was between them now some subtle bond of sympathy, unknown, undreamed of, even. Encouraged, he went on.