“I couldn’t do it! To me the woman who marries that way, for money, for position, or just to be married, is”—her voice dropped to a low note, touched with ineffable scorn—“is no better than the worst!”
The judge patted her shoulder.
“A high view, Di. I’ll agree with you thus far—if he wasn’t fine and honest, I’d never let you marry him if I could help it. In these days we fathers can’t help much, in my opinion; but I’ll help you out of it, my child, if ever he shows himself less than we think him—an honest man!”
“We’re alike in that, papa. That’s the unalterable test—his honesty. I couldn’t live, day after day, with a man whom I knew to be a liar and a thief, as Mabel Gardner does. Yet it’s noble in her, too. She stayed with her husband to try to hold him up, to keep him from falling to the lowest level.”
“It was sentiment and womanish feeling,” the judge retorted sternly. “There was nothing noble in it. She shielded him so that some of his creditors let him off a little for her sake. Goffery, the greatest creditor of all, who could have sent him to prison, wouldn’t testify, because he was in love with Mabel himself. She knew it—she played on him. That’s not noble; it’s mere knavery.”
“You mean that she should have sent him to prison rather than let Goffery save him for love of her?”
The judge nodded.
“Trading—mere trading! Not in the bare, ugly fact, as low people trade, but in sentiment and honor—making a wronged man save another because he still loves that other’s wife. She’ll get a divorce next and marry Goffery.”
“I can’t think that!” exclaimed Diane, gazing thoughtfully into the fire. “That would be degradation, papa, and Mabel’s a lady.”
“What’s a lady?” the judge snorted angrily. “Nothing, unless you’re a little better bred and nobler and more virtuous than the rest of womankind. If Mabel marries Goffery—after she gets a divorce—it’ll be paying him for all that he’s done, won’t it? There’s nothing ladylike in that! You’re a lady, Di—not so much by right of birth and breeding and all that, but because you’re an honest woman, and you wouldn’t do the kind of shabby, cowardly things that Mabel Gardner has done.”