“You two seem to have settled it between yourselves definitely enough,” Nance remarked at last. “I don’t really see why you need bring me into it at all. Adrian is, of course, entirely free to do what he likes. I don’t see what I have to do with it!”
Philippa’s hot fingers closed tightly upon Sorio’s as she received this rebuff. “You see!” she murmured in a tone that bit into Nance’s flesh like the tooth of an adder. “You see, Adriano!” She shrugged her shoulders and gave a low vindictive laugh. “She’s a thorough woman,” she added with stinging emphasis. “She’s what my mother would call a sweet, tender, sensitive girl. But we mustn’t expect too much from her, Adrian, must we? I mean in the way of generosity.”
Nance withdrew her hand from the arm of her betrothed and they all three walked on in silence.
“You see what you’re in for, my friend,” Philippa began again. “Once married it’ll be always like this. That is what you seem unable to realize. It’s a mistake, as I’ve often said, this mixing of classes.”
Nance could no longer restrain herself. “May I ask what you mean by that last remark?” she whispered in a low voice.
Philippa laughed lightly. “It doesn’t need much explanation,” she replied. “Adrian is, of course, of very ancient blood, and you—well, you betray yourself naturally by this lack of nobility, this common middle-class jealousy!”
Nance turned fiercely upon them, and clutching Sorio’s arm spoke loudly and passionately. “And you—what are you, who, like a girl of the streets, are ready to pick up what you can of a man’s attentions and attract him with mere morbid physical attraction? You—what are you, who, as you say yourself, are ready to share a man with some one else? Do you call that a sign of good-breeding?”
Philippa laughed again. “It’s a sign at any rate of being free from that stupid, stuffy, bourgeois respectability, which Adrian is going to get a taste of now! That very sneer of yours—‘a girl of the streets’—shows the class to which you belong, Nance Herrick! We don’t say those things. It’s what one hears among tradespeople.”
Nance’s fingers almost hurt Sorio’s arms as she tightened her hold upon him. “It’s better than being what you are, Philippa Renshaw,” she burst out. “It’s better than deliberately helping your brother to ruin innocent young girls—yes, and taking pleasure in seeing him ruining them—and then taunting them cruelly in their shame, and holding him back from doing them justice! It’s better than that, Philippa Renshaw, though it may be what most simple-minded decent-hearted women feel. It’s better than being reduced by blind passion to have to come to another woman and beg her on your knees for a ‘last day’ as you call it! It’s better than that—though it may be what ordinary unintellectual people feel!”
Philippa’s fingers grew suddenly numb and stiff in Sorio’s grasp. “Do you know,” she murmured, “you ‘decent-feeling’ woman—if that’s what you call yourself—that a couple of hours ago, when you left me on the river bank, I was within an ace of drowning myself? I suppose ‘decent-feeling’ women never run such a risk! They leave that to ‘street-girls’ and—and—and to us others!”