"Of course I am."
"It's just about the saddest thing that ever came to my knowledge," I said; "and you won't be angry if I say that I think you ought to stick to him and make the best of it?"
"You're not a woman. No man understands a woman's feeling of degradation at belonging to a man she doesn't love. Oh, it's an impossible situation. And I can't see any way out. I couldn't take money from John, if I left him; I haven't got a penny of my own. And I think it would kill me to go away from Jock and Hurry for long. And the other thing would just kill me."
"That," I said, "Lucy, I don't believe."
"You don't know. Not being a woman, you can't know."
"Men," I said, "and women too survive all sorts of things, mental and physical, that they think can't be survived. I read up the Spanish Inquisition once for a college essay, and the things they did to people were so bad that I was ashamed to put them in, and yet lots of those people survived and lived usefully to ripe old ages."
"Who did?"
Unheard by us, John had finished in the dining-room and had come to pay us a flying visit.
"People that were tortured by the Spanish Inquisition," I said.
"A lot they know about torture," said he. "They only did things to people that the same people could imagine doing back to them. Nothing is real torture if you can see your way to revenge it—if only in imagination. Torture is what you get through no fault of your own from somebody you'd not torture back for anything in the world. It's what sons do to mothers, husbands to wives, wives to husbands. Isn't that so, Lucy?"