“I do. There’s nothing I ask for now—if the step can’t be retrieved.”
“The step retrieved, my friend? There is no step backward in life.”
“I am thinking of you, Renée.”
“Yes, I know,” she answered hurriedly.
“If we discover that the step is a wrong one?” he pursued: “why is there no step backward?”
“I am talking of women,” said Renée.
“Why not for women?”
“Honourable women, I mean,” said Renée.
Beauchamp inclined to forget his position in finding matter to contest.
Yet it is beyond contest that there is no step backward in life. She spoke well; better than he, and she won his deference by it. Not only she spoke better: she was truer, distincter, braver: and a man ever on the look-out for superior qualities, and ready to bow to them, could not refuse her homage. With that a saving sense of power quitted him.