“How! did you tell your mother of the marriage, and have you kept that from me, too?” Josephine asked, and he replied:
“I did not tell her of the marriage, although I tried to, and made a beginning by showing her your picture, and telling her your name and that of your mother, whom she at once identified as the Roxie who had lived in her father’s family so long.”
“And of course my fine lady objected to such stock,” Josephine said, with a sneer in her voice.
“Josephine,” and Everard spoke more sternly than he had ever spoken to her in his life, “say what you like to me, but don’t mention my mother in that tone or spirit again. She did not despise you for your birth. No true woman would do that. She said that innate refinement or delicacy of feeling would always assert itself, and raise one above the lowest and humblest of positions. Almost her last words to me were of you, in whom she knew I was interested, for I had confessed as much.
“‘If she is so good, and womanly, and true, her birth is of no consequence—none whatever,’ she said. So you see she laid less stress upon it than do you, who know better than she did whether you are good, and womanly and true.”
Here Josephine began to cry, but Everard did not heed her tears, and went on:
“There is in this country no degradation in honest labor; it is the character, the actions, which tell; and were you what I believed you to be when in my madness I consented to that foolish farce, I would not care though your origin were the lowest which can be conceived.”
Here Josephine stopped crying, and demanded, sharply:
“What am I, pray? What do you know of me?—you, who have scarcely seen me half a dozen times since I became your wife.”
“I know more than you suppose,—have seen more than you guess,” he replied; “but let me begin with the morning I left you in Holburton, four years ago last June, and come down to the present time.”