Dartrey nodded, to signify a known sort of fellow.
‘She came here.’ Mrs. Marsett’s tears had risen. ‘I ought not to have let her come. I invited her—for once: I am lonely. None of my sex—none I could respect! I meant it for only once. She promised to sing to me. And, Oh! how she sings! You have heard her. My whole heart came out. I declare I believe girls exist who can hear our way of life—and I’m not so bad except compared with that angel, who heard me, and was and is, I could take oath, no worse for it. Some girls can; she is one. I am all for bringing them up in complete innocence. If I was a great lady, my daughters should never know anything of the world until they were married. But Miss Radnor is a young lady who cannot be hurt. She is above us. Oh! what a treasure for a man!—and my God! for any man born of woman to insult a saint, as she is!—He is a beast!’
‘Major Worrell met her here?’
‘Blame me as much as you like: I do myself. Half my rage with him is at myself for putting her in the way of such a beast to annoy. Each time she came, I said it was to be the last. I let her see what a mercy from heaven she was to me. She would come. It has not been many times. She wishes me either to... Captain Marsett has promised. And nothing seems hard—to me when my own God’s angel is by. She is! I’m not such a bad woman, but I never before I knew her knew the meaning of the word virtue. There is the young lady that man worried with his insulting remarks! though he must have known she was a lady:—because he found her in my rooms.’
‘You were present when, as you say, he insulted her?’
‘I was. Here it commenced; and he would see her downstairs.’
‘You heard?’
‘Of course, I never left her.’
‘Give me a notion...’
‘To get her to make an appointment: to let him conduct her home.’