Hadria stood looking down scornfully on her sister-in-law. She shrugged her shoulders, as if in bewilderment.
“And yet you would have felt yourselves stained with dishonour for the rest of your lives had you procured anything else on false pretences! But a woman—that is a different affair. The code of honour does not here apply, it would seem. Any fraud may be honourably practised on her, and wild is the surprise and indignation if she objects when she finds it out.”
“You are perfectly mad,” cried Henriette, tapping angrily with her fingers on the arm of her chair.
“What I say is true, whether I be mad or sane. What you call the ‘contract’ is simply a cunning contrivance for making a woman and her possible children the legal property of a man, and for enlisting her own honour and conscience to safeguard the disgraceful transaction.”
“Ah,” said Henriette, on the watch for her opportunity, “then you admit that her honour and conscience are enlisted?”
“Certainly, in the case of most women. That enlistment is a masterpiece of policy. To make a prisoner his own warder is surely no light stroke of genius. But that is exactly what I refused to be from the first, and no one could have spoken more plainly. And now you are shocked and pained and aggrieved because I won’t eat my words. Yet we have talked over all this, in my room at Dunaghee, by the hour. Oh! Henriette, why did you not listen to your conscience and be honest with me?”
“Hadria, you insult me.”
“Why could not Hubert choose one among the hundreds and thousands of women who would have passed under the yoke without a question, and have gladly harnessed herself to his chariot by the reins of her own conscience?”
“I would to heaven he had!” Henriette was goaded into replying.
Hadria laughed. Then her brow clouded with pain. “Ah, why did he not meet my frankness with an equal frankness, at the time? All this trouble would have been saved us both if only he had been honest.”