'Oh, yes: those untruths are always counted as men's honour.'
'They are not mine; nor my dishonour either. I never willingly spoke an untruth yet to man or woman. If this child were my mistress I would tell you so. You may remember that many a time you have bade me take my liberty. You would care nothing if I did so. Why should I have concealed what you would not have done me the honour to resent?'
He paused, expecting her to say some word of assent or dissent, but she remained silent.
'Certainly,' he said, bitterly, 'had I considered myself free in all ways I should have been justified in doing so. Few men of your world see less of you than I. Your very lacqueys know more of your engagements and your intentions than I do. You lend great brilliancy to my name, you give great distinction to my houses, you allow my children to sit by you in your carriage, and you permit me to receive kings for you in your antechambers. But more than that you deny me. If I sought elsewhere the tenderness I seek in vain from you, could you complain of my infidelity?'
'I do not complain of the infidelity; it is immaterial; I complain of the long series of elaborate deceptions with which you have endeavoured, with which you still endeavour, to surround it.'
'I repeat, there has been no deception.'
She laughed, laughed slightly that cruel laugh of a woman, which can tell a man with impunity what a man could never dare to tell him—that he has lied.
'You dare to doubt me still!' he exclaimed, with that blindness and good faith with which a man, candid and honest himself, expects credence from others; he had never in his heart really doubted that when he should tell the truth to her she would believe it.
Conscious rectitude has a curious pathetic ignorance of its own impotence to move others; it imagines that it has but to speak and mountains will fall before it.
Because this thing was clear as daylight to his own knowledge, to his own conscience, he stupidly thought that it must stand out plain as the noonday to her likewise. Those who tell the truth always fancy that the truth must be like those trumpets before which the walls of Jericho fell.