John Martin looked hopeless and helpless.
"I don't," he said, in pathetic self-defense, feeling somehow that the blame was personal.
"Oh, I don't mean you!" she exclaimed, almost impatiently. "I mean all who know it—who have known and understood it all along. How could men allow it? How dared they? And to think of encouraging such people to marry—to bring into a life like that such swarms of helpless children. Oh, the sin and shame and outrage of it!"
John Martin was dazed that she should look upon it as she did. He was surprised that she spoke so openly. He did not fully comprehend the power and force of real conviction and feeling overtaken in a sincere and fearlessly frank nature by such a knowledge for the first time.
"I should not have brought you here," he said, feebly, as they entered the waiting carriage which her mother had insisted she should take if she would go "slumming," as she had expressed it.
She turned an indignant face upon him.
"Why?" she demanded.
He tried to say something about a shock to her nerves, and such sights and knowledge being not for women.
"I had begun to feel that he respected me—believed in me—wanted, in truth and not merely in name, to share life with me," she thought, "but he does not: it is all a sham. He wants someone who shall not share life with him—not even his mental life."
"You would come here with papa, would you not?" she asked, presently. "You would talk over, look at, think of the problems of life with him,"—her voice began to tremble.