"I have distressed you," the priest said gently, taking her hand.
"No, no, but it is always painful to look back."
Father Hammond drew her towards the sofa by the open window, and seated himself at her side.
"Let us have a real friendly talk now I have been so lucky as to find you alone," he said. "I am glad—very glad—that you are tired of the whirlpool, for to be tired of a bad kind of life is the beginning of a better kind of life. You know what I think of modern Society, especially in its feminine aspect, and how I have grieved over the women who were made for better things than the witches' dance. We have talked of these things in your first husband's lifetime, but then I thought you were taking your frivolous pleasures with a careless indifference that showed your heart was not engaged in them, and that you had a mind for higher things. Even your dabbling with Mr. Symeon's quasi-supernatural philosophy was a sign of superiority. His disciples are not the basest or most empty-headed among worldlings, though they keep touch with the world. In those days you know I had hopes of you, but since you have been Claude Rutherford's wife, I have seen you given up to an insatiate love of pleasure, a headlong pursuit of every new thing, the more extravagant and the more dangerous the more hotly pursued by you and your husband; so that it has become a byword, 'If the thing is to cost a fortune, and to risk a life, the Rutherfords will be in it.'"
"Claude is impetuous, easily caught by novelty," she said deprecatingly, with lowered eyelids.
"He was not always so impetuous, rather a loiterer, indifferent to all strenuous pleasures, delighting in all that is best in literature, and worshipping all that is best in art, though too idle to achieve excellence even in the art he loved. But since his marriage—and forgive me if I say since his command of your wealth—he has changed and degenerated."
"You are not complimentary to his wife," Vera said, with a faint laugh.
"I am too much in earnest to be polite, but it is not your influence that has done harm, it is your money—that fatal gold which has changed the whole aspect of Society within the last thirty years, a change that will continue from bad to worse as long as diamond mines and gold mines are productive, and the inheritors of great names can smile at the vulgarity of millionaires who 'do them well' and will give the open hand of friendship to a host who to-morrow may be branded as a thief What does it matter, if the thief has bought Lord Somebody's estate, and shooting that is among the best in England?"
"Well, it is all done with now, as far as I am concerned," Vera said wearily. "I used to go everywhere Claude liked to go. People laughed at us for being inseparable; but I am sick to death of it all, and now he must go to the fine houses alone. No doubt he will be all the more welcome."
"Perhaps; but I did not come to talk of trivialities or to echo hackneyed diatribes against a state of things so corrupt and evil that its vices have become the staple of every preacher's discourses, cleric or layman. I want to talk about you and your husband, not about the world you live in. Since you have done with the whirlpool, there is nothing to keep you from better influences. Will you let mine be the hand to lead you along the passive way of light and love, the way that leads to pardon and peace?"