"No, indeed no," he replied, "though I am properly rebuked. I fear I am malicious—just a little, but it is all inner-self-malice: 'Rome turned upon itself.'"
"But one cannot always tell when irony is intended for the speaker of it. Yours did not seem applied to yourself," was her slow answer, and she seemed more interested in Mount Trinity than in him.
"No?" Then he said with a playful sadness: "A moment ago you were not completely innocent of irony, were you?"
"But a man is big and broad, and should not—he should be magnanimous, leaving it to woman, whose life is spent among little things, to be guilty of littlenesses. But see how daring I am—speaking like this to you who know so much more than I do. . . . Surely, you are still only humorous, when you speak of irony turned upon yourself—the irony so icy to your friends?"
She had developed greatly. Her mind had been sharpened by pain. The edge of her wit had become poignant, her speech rendered logical and allusive. Roscoe was wise enough to understand that the change in her had been achieved by the change in himself; that since Mrs. Falchion came, Ruth had awakened sharply to a distress not exactly definable. She felt that though he had never spoken of love to her, she had a right to share his troubles. The infrequency of his visits to her of late, and something in his manner, made her uneasy and a little bitter. For there was an understanding between them, though it had been unspoken and unwritten. They had vowed without priest or witness. The heart speaks eloquently in symbols first, and afterwards in stumbling words.
It seemed to Roscoe at this moment, as it had seemed for some time, that the words would never be spoken. And was this all that had troubled her —the belief that Mrs. Falchion had some claim upon his life? Or had she knowledge, got in some strange way, of that wretched shadow in his past?
This possibility filled him with bitterness. The old Adam in him awoke, and he said within himself "God in heaven, must one folly, one sin, kill me and her too? Why me more than another! . . . And I love her, I love her!"
His eyes flamed until their blue looked all black, and his brows grew straight over them sharply, making his face almost stern. . . . There came swift visions of renouncing his present life; of going with her— anywhere: to tell her all, beg her forgiveness, and begin life over again, admitting that this attempt at expiation was a mistake; to have his conscience clear of secret, and trust her kindness. For now he was sure that Mrs. Falchion meant to make his position as a clergyman impossible; to revenge herself on him for no wrong that, as far as he knew, he ever did directly to her. But to tell this girl, or even her father or mother, that he had been married, after a shameful, unsanctified fashion, to a savage, with what came after, and the awful thing that happened—he who ministered at the altar! Now that he looked the thing in the face it shocked him. No, he could not do it.
She said to him, while he looked at her as though he would read her through and through, though his mind was occupied with a dreadful possibility beyond her:
"Why do you look so? You are stern. You are critical. Have I— disimproved so?"