She said deliberately: "I hope there is not, Phil. Nor do I credit any mischievous gossip which ventures to link my brother's name with the name of Mrs. Ruthven."
He paid no heed to what she hinted, and he was still thinking of Ruthven when he said: "The most contemptible and cowardly thing a man can do is to fail a person dependent on him—when that person is in prospective danger. The dependence, the threatened helplessness must appeal to any man! How can he, then, fail to stand by a person in trouble—a person linked to him by every tie, every obligation. Why—why to fail at such a time is dastardly—and to—to make a possible threatened infirmity a reason for abandoning a woman is monstrous—!"
"Phil! I never for a moment supposed that even if you suspected Alixe to be not perfectly responsible you would have abandoned her—"
"I? Abandon her!" He laughed bitterly. "I was not speaking of myself," he said. . . . And to himself he wondered: "Was it that—after all? Is that the key to my dreadful inability to understand? I cannot—I cannot accept it. I know her; it was not that; it—it must not be!"
And that night he wrote to her:
"If he threatens you with divorce on such a ground he himself is likely to be adjudged mentally unsound. It was a brutal, stupid threat, nothing more; and his insult to your father's memory was more brutal still. Don't be stampeded by such threats. Disprove them by your calm self-control under provocation; disprove them by your discretion and self-confidence. Give nobody a single possible reason for gossip. And above all, Alixe, don't become worried and morbid over anything you might dread as inheritance, for you are as sound to-day as you were when I first met you; and you shall not doubt that you could ever be anything else. Be the woman you can be! Show the pluck and courage to make the very best out of life. I have slowly learned to attempt it; and it is not difficult if you convince yourself that it can be done."
To this she answered the next day:
"I will do my best. There is danger and treachery everywhere; and if it becomes unendurable I shall put an end to it in one way or another. As for his threat—incident on my admitting that I did go to your room, and defying him to dare believe evil of me for doing it—I can laugh at it now—though, when I wrote you, I was terrified—remembering how mentally broken my father was when he died.
"But, as you say, I am sound, body and mind. I know it; I don't doubt it for one moment—except—at long intervals when, apropos of nothing, a faint sensation of dread comes creeping.
"But I am sound! I know it so absolutely that I sometimes wonder at my own perfect sanity and understanding; and so clearly, so faultlessly, so precisely does my mind work that—and this I never told you—I am often and often able to detect mental inadequacy in many people around me—the slightest deviation from the normal, the least degree of mental instability. Phil, so sensitive to extraneous impression is my mind that you would be astonished to know how instantly perceptible to me is mental degeneration in other people. And it would amaze you, too, if I should tell you how many, many people you know are, in some degree, more or less insane.