“I am sorry you take that view.”
“How can I take any other? What man or woman of the world would take any other? You hold a magnificent position. You have the means of leading a life of extreme usefulness and beauty. You can marry and have children to whom your property can pass. If it has been defiled at its source, it will be purified in passing through your hands. Foul water going through a porcelain filter comes out clear. You are not responsible for what your father did. His crimes, if he committed any, lie buried with him. Neither God nor man can call you to account for them.”
“I call myself.”
“This is midsummer madness in midwinter! If you put your project into execution, you would be rooked, robbed, ruined on every side, and you would raise a hornet’s nest of swindlers around you. No one would be grateful to you. All would turn you into ridicule and environ you with intrigue. My dear, you have had Aladdin’s lamp given to you. For Heaven’s sake use it for your own happiness and that of others. Do not break it because there is a flaw in the glass. There is your mother also to be considered,” he added after a pause. “What right have you to cause her such change of circumstance, such possible mortification as your abandonment of your inheritance would bring with it?”
“In that perhaps you may be right,” said Katherine wearily, “but in that only, and perhaps not even in that. You speak with the view of the world, and wisely no doubt. But I am sorry you see it so. I should have hoped you would have understood me better.”
He strove to turn her and to argue with her for more than two hours, but he failed to bring home his own convictions to her mind.
“Marry, marry, marry!” he said. “It is the only cure for distempered dreams.”
“I shall not marry,” replied Katherine, “and I do not dream. What I have said to you are facts. What I mean to do is expiation.”
Framlingham shook his head.
“When a woman is once started on the road of self-sacrifice, an eighty-horse power would not hold her back from pursuing it. Good-night, my dear.”