“Because Lucia Darro was a woman, and—well! I’ll make a clean breast of it—and because, although a man and woman love each other as long and dearly as Lucia Darro and her husband have and do, there is still something in the woman that the man can not quite understand, and upon which he is forever experimenting. So I was curious to hear, or rather to see and feel, what your thoughts were; and, at the moment I spoke, I thought I saw them, and I was surprised.”
“Exactly, Sir; and that surprise ought to have shown you that I was no saint. Listen again, Sir. Lucia Darro’s husband was never jilted by Laura Magot, for the impetuous and ambitious young man who was engaged to that lady is an entirely different person from my husband. Do you hear, Sir?”
“Precisely; and who made him so entirely different?”
“Hush, Sir! I’ve no time to hear such folly. I, too, am going to make a clean breast of it, and confess that there was the least little sense of—of—of—well, justice, in my mind, when I thought that Laura Magot who jilted you, who were so unfortunate, and with whom she might have been so happy—”
Gerald Bennet dissented, with smiles and shaking head.
“Hush, Sir! Any woman might have been. That she should have led such a life with Boniface Newt, and have seen him ruined after all. Poor soul! poor soul!”
“Which?” asked her husband.
“Both—both, Sir. I pity them both from my heart.”
“Thou womanest of women!” retorted her husband. “Art thou, therefore, no saint because thou pitiest them?”
“No, no; but because it was not an unmixed pity.”