“Oh, it’s best not to have Dominick know,” he said easily; “not because there’s anything to be ashamed of, but on general principles it’s best to have as few complications as possible in the way of other people’s butting in. What good would there be in Dominick’s knowing?”
She rolled the blotter back and forth for a moment without answering, then said,
“So Mrs. Ryan offers me fifty thousand dollars to desert my husband?”
“With one condition—that you leave the country. Just look what that’s going to mean!” He rose from the narrow, upholstered seat, took a light chair that stood near by and, setting it close to her, sat sidewise on it, one hand extended toward her. “Fifty thousand dollars is a good bit of money over here, but over there it’s a fortune. You’d be a rich woman with that amount in your own right. You could take an apartment in Paris, or a slice of some prince-feller’s palace down in Rome. On the income of that capital, safely invested, you could live in a style that only a millionaire can manage over here—have your own carriage, dress like a queen, go to the opera. They like Americans, especially when they’ve got money. First thing you know you’d be right in it, knowing everybody, and going everywhere. You’re nobody here, worse than nobody. Over there you’d be one of the people everybody was talking about and wanted to know. You’re not only a pretty woman, you’re a smart woman; you could get on top in no time, marry into the nobility if you wanted.”
Berny, her eyes on the blotter, said nothing.
“And what’s the alternative over here?” the tempter continued. “Staying on as an outsider, being in a position where, though you’re lawfully married and are living decently with your husband, you’re ostracized as completely as if you weren’t married at all; where you’ve hardly got enough to pay your way, cramped up in a corner like this, never going anywhere or seeing anybody. Does that kind of life appeal to you? Not if I know anything.”
Berny lifted her head and looked at him. The color was now burning in her cheeks and her eyes seemed to hold all the vitality of her rigid face.
“You tell Mrs. Ryan,” she said slowly, “that I’ll lie dead in my coffin before I’ll take her money and leave my husband.”
They looked at each other for a silent moment, two strong and determined antagonists. Then the old man said mildly and pleasantly,
“Now don’t be too hasty; don’t jump at a decision in the heat of the moment. Just at the first glimpse this way, you may feel surprised—may take it as sort of out of the way and interfering. But when you’ve thought it over, it will look different. Take time. You don’t have to make your mind up now, or to-morrow, or the day after. Turn it over, look at the other side, sleep on it for a few nights. Think a bit of the things I’ve said. You don’t want to be hasty about it. It’s not the kind of offer you get every day.”