"Do you know that this unfortunate affair of Alice Hook's is laid remotely to me?" he said, with a sternness, which he could not help, in his tone. "People are saying that if I gave them decent dwellings, decent conduct would ensue. It is so. God knows that I feel its truth more keenly than my reproachers."
"The dwellings are good enough for the poor."
"Sibylla! You cannot think it. The laws of God and man alike demand a change. Child," he continued in a softer tone, as he took her hand in his, "let us bring the case home to ourselves. Suppose that you and I had to sleep in a room a few feet square, no chimney, no air, and that others tenanted it with us? Girls and boys growing up—nay, grown up, some of them; men and women as we are, Sibylla. The beds huddled together, no space between them; sickness, fever—"
"I am only shutting my ears," interrupted Sibylla. "You pretend to be so careful of me—you would not even let me go to that masked ball in Paris—and yet you put these horrid pictures into my mind! I think you ought to be ashamed of it, Lionel. People sleeping in the same room with us!"
"If the picture be revolting, what must be the reality?" was his rejoinder. "They have to endure it."
"They are used to it," retorted Sibylla. "They are brought up to nothing better."
"Just so. And therefore their perceptions of right and wrong are deadened. The wonder is, not that Alice Hook has lost herself, but that—"
"I don't want to hear about Alice Hook," interrupted Sibylla. "She is not very good to talk about."
"I have been openly told, Sibylla, that the reproach should lie at my door."
"I believe it is not the first reproach of the kind that has been cast on you," answered Sibylla, with cutting sarcasm.