“And you would give up all this?” he was saying. “You’d leave Pentlands and all it stands for to marry this cheap Irishman ... a nobody, the son perhaps of an immigrant dock-laborer.”
“He is the son of a dock-laborer,” she answered quietly. “And his mother was a housemaid. He’s told me so himself. And as to all this.... Why, Anson, it doesn’t mean anything to me ... nothing at all that I can’t give up, nothing which means very much. I’m fond of your father, Anson, and I’m fond of you when you are yourself and not talking about what a gentleman would do. But I’d give it all up ... everything ... for the sake of this other thing.”
For a moment his lips moved silently and in agitation, as if it were impossible for him to answer things so preposterous as those his wife had just spoken. At last he was able to say, “I think you must have lost your mind, Olivia ... to even think of asking such a thing of me. You’ve lived here long enough to know how impossible it is. Some of us must make a stand in a community. There has never been a scandal, or even a divorce, in the Pentland family ... never. We’ve come to stand for something. Three hundred years of clean, moral living can’t be dashed aside so easily.... We’re in a position where others look up to us. Can’t you see that? Can’t you understand such a responsibility?”
For a moment she had a terrible, dizzy, intoxicating sense of power, of knowing that she held the means of destroying him and all this whited structure of pride and respectability. She had only to begin by saying, “There was Savina Pentland and her lover....” The moment passed quickly and at once she knew that it was a thing she could not do. Instead, she murmured, “Ah, Anson, do you think the world really looks at us at all? Do you think it really cares what we do or don’t do? You can’t be as blind as that.”
“I’m not blind ... only there’s such a thing as honor and tradition. We stand for something....”
She interrupted him. “For what?”
“For decency, for a glorious past, for stability ... for endless things ... all the things which count in a civilized community.”
He really believed what he was saying; she knew that he must have believed it to have written all those thousands of dull, laborious words in glorification of the past.
He went on. “No, what you ask is impossible. You knew it before you asked.... And it would be a kindness to me if you never mentioned it again.”
He was still pale, but he had gained control of himself and his hands no longer trembled; as he talked, as his sense of virtue mounted, he even grew eloquent, and his voice took on a shade of that unction which had always colored the voice of the Apostle to the Genteel and made of him a celebrated and fashionable cleric. Perhaps for the first time since his childhood, since the days when the red-haired little Sabine had mocked his curls and velvet suits, he felt himself a strong and powerful person. There was a kind of fierce intoxication in the knowledge of his power over Olivia. In his virtuous ardor he seemed for a moment to become a positive, almost admirable person.