“Personally,” said Serge, “I would sell my honour for twopence.”
“Oh! you! . . . But then you don’t care what anybody thinks of you.”
“Not a straw.”
“Then it isn’t any good talking to you. You really are an immoral man. . . . If Basil goes for me, I shall go for him. You’d hold up the other cheek, I know, but then you’re not human. I told my children once to think before they struck, and Benny said, ‘I do think, and then I strike. . . .’ I’m like that too. I’m not going to listen to you. I’m not going back to Basil, I’m not going to lie down and let him weep over my sins in public. He’s a little beast and everybody shall know that he’s a little beast. . . .”
Minna had worked herself up into a state of anger. She was hot and red in the face with it, and looked coarse and unpleasant.
Serge said to himself:
“No wonder knight-errantry is dead, since women have taken upon themselves to be as stupidly selfish as men.”
He made one last effort, and suggested that she should take the more sensible course and leave it to Basil unopposed to set the cumbrous machinery of the law in motion, if only for the sake of her father and mother. To that Minna only replied with a brilliant but spiteful caricature of Mrs. Folyat’s state of mind as slowly she digested the unpalatable truth that all marriages were not made in Heaven.
Serge wrote to Francis that night and told him that there was no hope, since both Minna and Basil were resolute to part. All that could be looked for was that they would injure each other as little as possible in the process. So far as he could see, the pain of uprooting was over. The pair were absolutely divorced. Unhappily, they seemed determined to call down on each other the disapprobation of the world, in their frenziedly childish desire to hurt each other. . . . Serge begged Francis to make his mother take a reasonable, human view of it, since Minna would need friendliness and assistance, and suggested that he should come to an arrangement with Basil’s family for the maintenance of the children.
His letter ended thus: