He changes his tone. "Constance," he says, gravely, "when I proposed to you, did not I tell you, honestly, what I could give you and what I could not? Love (odd as it may sound between engaged people), and the blind admiration that accompanies love, I had not got to offer you; this is true, is not it?"
"Perfectly true," she answers, resentfully; "and as I am not, nor ever was, one of those inflammable young ladies, who think that burning, and consuming, and melting are essential to married happiness, I did not much regret its absence. I have always been brought up to think," she continues, having recourse to the high moral tone which is her last sure refuge, "that respect and esteem are the best basis for two people to go upon, and I think so still."
"But do you and I respect and esteem one another?" he asks, half-cynically, half-mournfully. "Is it possible that I can respect you, who, though you did not care, or affect to care, two straws about me personally—though you knew, at the time I asked you to marry me, that I was madly in love with another woman—were yet willing to give yourself to me, soul and body—to be bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh, because I was a good parti, as the vile phrase goes? And as for me," he ends, in bitter self-contempt, "what is there in all my idle wasted life, from beginning to end, that any one can respect or esteem?"
"Has this struck you now for the first time?" she asks, drily. "I am not aware of any change in our relative circumstances since our marriage was arranged; I suppose our feelings towards each other are much what they were then, when you were troubled with none of these scruples."
"And what were our feelings then?" he asks, bitterly; "what brought us together? Was not it that our properties dovetailed conveniently into one another, as Sir Thomas says—that it was advisable for both of us to marry some one—that we were of suitable age, and had no positive distaste for one another: was not this so?"
"I suppose so," she answers, sulkily.
"And yet," he continues, sternly, "although I had laid bare to you all my wretched story—although you were well aware that I was utterly without the safeguard of any love to yourself—you yet let me fall into this temptation—the cruelest I could have been exposed to—without a word of warning. Was this fair? Was this right?"
"Since you put me on my defence," she answers, with anger, "I must repeat to you what I said before, that it seemed to me the best method of curing you of your ill-placed fancy for Esther Craven—a fancy which she repaid with such disgraceful deceit and duplicity—was to let you see for yourself what a wreck she had become!"
"You meant well, perhaps," he rejoins, with a sigh that is more than half a groan; "but it was terribly mistaken—terribly ill-judged; it has done us both an irreparable injury."
"I am not aware that it has done me any injury whatever," she answers, coldly, mistaking his meaning