"Sure of him?"
"Why do you suppose I'm hurrying you away? Do you want the papers to get hold of the fact you were keeping an assignation with this actor when his wife caught you and shot him?"
Lucinda flinched, faintly remonstrated: "Bel!"
"Well?" he demanded—"got anything to say to that?"
"You don't think ... nobody would dare...."
"What's the reason I don't think? Why wouldn't anybody dare? I presume you expect the world—this good, kind, charitable world we live in—to believe 'appearances are against you'!"
Affronted, she held her answer, seeing her husband as with eyes from which scales had newly dropped, as a man she barely knew, whose fleshy husk alone was familiar in her sight, but whose spirit was altogether strange: a man self-reliant and resolute, skeptical, cold and hard of temper, estranged and unforgiving; witness the contemptuous incredulity that animated his regard.
Smouldering indignation blazed, she threw back her head with eyes as cold as his, a mouth as hard.
"You are insolent," she pronounced slowly. "If you think—if you dare think what you hint—what is it to you whether I go or stay?"
"You forget you neglected to get rid of a husband before taking on with this busy lover ... who got precisely what was coming to him, if you want the truth for once!"