Heriot rose.
"I can't discuss my sentiments with you, Mrs. Baines. Think, if you like, that I didn't care for her at all. At least my duty to her is over; and I have a duty to myself to-day."
"To cast her off?" The semi-educated classes use the phrases of novelettes habitually. Whether this is the reason the novelettes trade in the phrases, or whether the semi-educated acquire the phrases from the novelettes, is not clear.
"To——" He paused. He could not trust himself to speak at that moment.
"To cast her off?" repeated Mrs. Baines. "Oh, I don't make excuses for her—I don't pity her. Though she is my brother's child, I say she is deserving of whatever befalls her. I remember well that when Dick married I warned him against it; I said, 'She isn't the wife for you!' It's the mother's blood coming out in her, though my brother's child. But ... What was I going to say? I'm that upset that—— Oh yes! I make no excuses for her, but I would have liked to see more sorrow on your part, Mr. Heriot; I could have pitied you more if you'd have taken it more to heart. You may think me too bold, but it was ever my way to say what was in my mind. I don't think I'll stop any longer. The way you may take it is between you and your Gawd, but——" She put out her hand. "I don't think I'll stop."
"Good-evening," he said stonily. "I'm sorry you can't stay and dine."
She recollected on the stairs that she had not inquired who the man was; but she was too much disgusted by Heriot's manner to go back.
CHAPTER IX
When a naturally pure woman, who is not sustained by any emancipated views, consents to live with a man in defiance of social prejudices, she probably obtains as clear an insight as the world affords into the enormous difference that exists between the ideal and the actual. Matrimony does not illumine the difference so vividly, because matrimony, with all its disillusions, leaves her an unembarrassed conscience. With her lover such a woman experiences all the prose of wedlock, and a sting to boot. A man cannot be at concert-pitch all day long with his mistress any more easily than with his wife. She has to submit to bills and other practical matters just as much with a smirched reputation as she had with a spotless one. The romance does not wear any better because the Marriage Service is omitted. A lover is no less liable to be commonplace than a husband when the laundress knocks the buttons off his shirts.