"If you persist in putting such a question I shall understand that you have no sense of decency; surely any young woman with a spark of honour in her composition, must perceive that in such a situation the man would not be likely to send--that the initiative must come from her, not from him."
"I simply wish to learn if Mr. Robert Spencer knows that you have come to me upon this errand."
"He does not know; which gives you an opportunity to free him gracefully before the true state of affairs does come to his knowledge."
"If he wishes to be what you call 'free,' do you suppose that for one moment I would stand in his way?"
"It is not so much a question of what he wishes, as of what you wish. If you wish, though ever so slightly, to hold him to his bargain, I dare say he'll be held, even to the extent of making you his wife; though he will regret it ever afterwards, and will probably live to curse the day on which you first placed yourself in his path. Young men have married undesirable women, who were in no way fitted to be their wives, and who were thinking only of themselves, before to-day, and will again; I have seen examples of it in my own family, to my great sorrow. I intend, if I can, to save my son Robert from such a fate, whatever you may say or do; the purport of my presence here is merely to learn if you are, or are not, possessed of a shred of principle."
"I cannot conceive why you talk to me like this; what makes you think yourself entitled to take up such an attitude towards me; what I have done which causes you to address me in such a strain."
"That's high-faluting, it's talk of that sort which makes me suspect that you must be even worse than I supposed. Your father held you out to the world as a young woman who was rich already, and who would be still richer later on, and you tacitly endorsed his positive statements; then he dies just in time to save himself from being made a fraudulent bankrupt, leaving you worse than a pauper, and you have the assurance to pretend to wonder why I and the Earl regard you--I will be as civil as I can--askance. Talk sense, Miss Lindsay; don't presume on our simplicity any longer. You are perfectly well aware that, had we been aware of the truth from the first, we should never have countenanced you in any way whatever. Your father's lies, with which you went out of your way to associate yourself--I know!--deceived us; and they deceived my son; there's the truth for you, if you never heard it before."
Nora looked as if she could have said many things; but she only asked a question.
"What, precisely, is it that you wish me to do?"
"I wish you to do something to, at least in part, undo the mischief which you have done already, to atone for the evil of which you have been the cause; I wish you to show by your demeanour your consciousness of the miserably false position in which you have been placed by others, or in which you have placed yourself, it doesn't matter which. In other, and plainer words, I wish you to hand me my son's letters and presents, and to sit down at once and write a letter, which I will hand him, in which you express your appreciation of the fact that he asked you to become his wife under an entire misapprehension, and that now, since circumstances have turned out so wholly different to what they were represented to be, your own self-respect forbids you to allow any association to continue between you; and that, in short, all is over between you, in every possible sense of the phrase. I want you to put that down, as plainly, and as finally, as it can be put, in black and white, because, Miss Lindsay, I wish to save my son Robert, at the earliest possible, from the danger in which he stands, and to do it while he is still absent."