It was an excellent sort of answer. Dyker tossed his head.
"I am hurt, Marian," he said. "I thought you had some faith in me; I thought you knew me. I don't see how you can persist in this attitude—how you can say these things. Why, I have been in your house: I have known you and your father; whereas these people—Marian, I love you; why should I lie to you?"
She had been keeping her hand upon her forehead, but she lowered it now to her eyes, where it was joined by its mate.
"I don't know," she moaned. "That's just it: I don't know."
"Then what," he asked, "can I do to convince you? I won't upbraid you; I won't be harsh. My sane course would be to pay no attention to accusations from such a character as this Mary Morton, and your sane course would be to pay no attention to them. But I know how things are in this neighborhood; I know the bad atmosphere you have been breathing ever since you came down here. Long ago I told you exactly what would happen; I foresaw it all. I told you when you insisted on going into this work that these women would poison your mind, distort your vision, make you doubt all that is best in life. Apparently, they have succeeded; but I don't speak of that. Marian, unless it was in some police-court—perhaps at the time I saw Rose Légère—I never saw this girl in my life. I don't understand her enmity any better than you do. It may spring from some imagined wrong to one of her friends, or it may be a political plot. But, except as it affects your regard for me, I don't care anything about it. All that I do care about, all that I do want to accomplish is to restore you to a normal view of things, get you out of these foul mental and material surroundings, and bring you back to your own proper world. I want to do this and to make you know the truth concerning myself. Tell me what will bring this about, and I'll do it without a moment's loss of time."
He thought that, in the nature of the case, there was nothing very difficult or inconvenient that she could demand; but he had counted too much on the artificial and too little upon the natural and primitive woman.
Her face still hidden, she felt the full force of his appeal, but the tempest had its wild will of her. She believed him guilty; she believed him innocent. She believed that, if he were guilty, temptation had come from the woman; she believed that, if he were innocent, there was nevertheless something—she did not know what—that he was hiding from her. Faith was ready to destroy much, but would not jealousy destroy more? Her jealousy had consumed dignity, it had ravaged custom, it was burning restraint.
Mary's words had drawn in Marian's mind a concrete picture, and the contemplation of that picture had awakened an anger in which her genuine love had for the first time genuinely expressed itself. Before, she could have heard with light regret of Dyker's engagement to marry another woman. Before, she might herself have drifted with him through a placid wooing into the port of marriage that, until this revelation, she had in no wise understood. But now she saw things specifically, and in the element of the specific the quality that she had known as "womanliness" was dissolved and the thing that she at last knew to be Woman was evolved.
The issue, she was thus still determined, depended upon proof of innocence. He must be clean, and she must know it.
She uncovered her fine face, strangely stronger for its grief.