“Will you answer my question?” he repeated doggedly.
“No. You have no right to question me.”
“I’m assuming the right. Your memory of the past——”
“There is no past. It was the dream of a silly child in another world where men were honest and women clean. I’ve grown older, Mr. Gallatin.”
“Yes, but not in mercy, not in compassion, not in charity.”
“Speak of virtue before you speak of mercy, of pride before compassion, of decency before charity—if you can,” she added contemptuously.
“You’re cruel,” he muttered, “horribly so.”
“I’m wiser than I was. The world has done me that service. And if cruelty is the price of wisdom, I’ll pay it. Baseness, meanness, improbity in business or in morals no longer surprise me. They’re woven into the tissue of life. I can abominate the conditions that cause them, but they are the world. And, until I choose to live alone, I must accept them even if I despise the men and women who practice them, Mr. Gallatin.”
“And you call this wisdom? This disbelief in everything—in everybody, this threadbare creed of the jaded women of the world?”
“Call it what you like. Neither your opinions nor your principles (or the lack of them) mean anything to me. If I had known you were here I should not have come to-night. I pray that we may never meet again.”