“I never did think so until now,” returned Paul steadily. “Your excuses accuse you. You may care for him. I do not know; I—do—not—care.”
She turned slowly and went back to her chair.
Mechanically she took up the brush, and shook back her beautiful hair.
“You mean you do not care for me,” she said. “Oh, Paul! be careful.”
Paul stood looking at her. He was not a subtle-minded man at all. He was not one of those who take it upon themselves to say that they understand women—using the word in an offensively general sense, as if women were situated midway between the human and the animal races. He was old-fashioned enough to look upon women as higher and purer than men, while equally capable of thought and self-control. He had, it must be remembered, no great taste for fictional literature. He had not read the voluminous lucubrations of the modern woman writer. He had not assisted at the nauseating spectacle of a woman morally turning herself inside out in three volumes and an interview.
No, this man respected women still; and he paid them an honor which, thank Heaven, most of them still deserve. He treated them as men in the sense that he considered them to be under the same code of right and wrong, of good and evil.
He did not understand what Etta meant when she told him to be careful. He did not know that the modern social code is like the Spanish grammar—there are so many exceptions that the rules are hardly worth noting. And one of our most notorious modern exceptions is the married woman who is pleased to hold herself excused because outsiders tell her that her husband does not understand her.
“I do not think,” said Paul judicially, “that you can have cared very much whether I loved you or not. When you married me you knew that I was the promoter of the Charity League; I almost told you. I told you so much that, with your knowledge, you must have been aware of the fact that I was heavily interested in the undertaking which you betrayed. You married me without certain proof of your husband’s death, such was your indecent haste to call yourself a princess. And now I find, on your own confession, that you have a clandestine understanding with a man who tried to murder me only a week ago. Is it not rather absurd to talk of caring?”
He stood looking down at her, cold and terrible in the white heat of his suppressed Northern anger.
The little clock on the mantel-piece, in a terrible hurry, ticked with all its might. Time was speeding. Every moment was against her. And she could think of nothing to say simply because those things that she would have said to others would carry no weight with this man.