"And even if you were right, why should I in this particular case 'shirk the responsibility,' as you put it? Surely it is not responsibility we have incurred, but gratitude."
She walked by his side over to the open windows which looked out on to the as yet uncultivated and barren gardens.
"The question is this," she said at last: "Does the superficial gratitude of a crowd in any way compensate for the fact that, in order to obtain it, a whole life's happiness has been incidentally sacrificed?"
"I know to whom you are alluding," he said, looking earnestly at her, "although, as a matter of fact, the two things have nothing to do with each other, except in your imagination. You mean Lois. Yes, of course she has had a hard time. Who doesn't? But it's rubbish to talk of a 'life's happiness.' In the first place, there isn't such a thing—nothing lasts so long as a lifetime, I assure you. In the second, Lois has not sustained any real loss—not any which I can not make good to her."
"Do you imagine yourself so all-sufficient?" she asked.
"I have confidence in my own powers," he admitted. "That is the first condition of success. I believe that in a few hours I shall have Lois on the road to recovery."
"I do not in the least understand your methods," Beatrice said, "but they have hitherto been so eminently successful that I suppose I ought not to question them. I hope for the best. I really was rather sorry for Lois—especially as she behaved so well."
"Are you starting a conscience, Miss Beatrice?" Travers asked gaily. "I rather suspect you. It would be such a typically feminine proceeding."
"There you are quite wrong," she answered, with a shade of annoyance in her cool voice. "A conscience is an appendage which I discarded a good many years ago as the luxury of respectability. As you know, and as any woman at the Station would tell you, I am not respectable."
"Whence this anxiety, then?"