“Oh, leave us an occasional ideal, Mrs. Polhemus,” laughed a guest. “I for one wish that fairy rings and genii were still the vogue.”
“But we have some kinds of miracles,” asserted Mrs. Granger. “Remember the distich,—
‘God still works wonders now and then:
Behold! two lawyers, honest men!’”
“With all due deference to Miss Walton’s championing of absolute perfection,” continued my mother, with a cleverly detached manner, to veil what lay back of the sneer, “I find it much easier to accept the miracle of an honest lawyer than that of an absolutely uncattish woman,”—a speech which, like most of those of Mrs. Polhemus, drew a laugh from the men.
“That’s because you don’t know Miss Walton!” exclaimed Agnes warmly, evidently fretted by such conduct towards you.
“On the contrary,” answered my mother, speaking coolly and evenly, “I presume I have known Miss Walton longer and better than any one else in this room; and I remember when her views of honesty were such that her ideal was personified by a pair of embezzlers.”
You had been meeting her gaze across the table as she spoke, but now you dropped your lids, hiding your eyes behind their long lashes; and nothing but the color receding from your cheeks, leaving them as white as your throat and brow, told of what you felt.
“Oh, say something,” appealed Agnes to me in a whisper. “Anything to divert the”—
“And I really think,” went on Mrs. Polhemus, smiling sweetly, with her eyes on you, “that if you were as thoroughly honest with us as, a moment ago, you were insistent on the world’s being, you would confess to a tendresse still felt for that particular form of obliquity.”
I shall recall the moment which followed that speech if it shall ever fall to me to sit in the jury-box and pass judgment on a murderer, for I know that had I been armed, and my mother a man, I should have killed her; and it taught me that murder is in every man’s heart. Yet I was not out of my head, but was curiously clear-minded. Though allusion to my shame had hitherto always made me dumb, I was able to speak now without the slightest difficulty; I imagine because the thought of your pain made me forget my own.