“Why should they hate you?”
“O, we all hate each other, and want to overreach one another. Envy and malice are in the air. Picture to yourself fifty manœuvring mothers with a hundred marriageable daughters, most of them portionless, and about twenty eligible men. Think how ferocious the competition must be!”
“But you are independent of all that; you are outside the arena.”
“Yes; I have nothing to do with their slavemarket, but they hate me all the same; perhaps because I have a little more money than most of them; perhaps because I am nobody—a waif and stray—able to give no account of my existence.”
She spoke of her position with a reckless candour that shocked him.
“There is something to bear in every lot,” he said, trying to be philosophical.
“I suppose so, but I only care about my own burden. Please, don’t pretend that you do either. I should despise a man who pretended not to be selfish.”
“Do you think that all men are selfish?”
“I have never seen any evidence to the contrary. The man I thought the noblest and the best did me the greatest wrong it was possible to do me, in order to spare himself trouble.”
Ransome was silent. He would not enter into the discussion of a past history of which he was ignorant, and which was doubtless full of pain.