"After all," she said practically, "what has that to do with it? One doesn't blame these people. They are stupid—that's all. They want the obvious. The leading lady of Mr. Llewellyn Stanhope—without the smallest diamond—who does song and dance on Saturday nights—what can you expect. If I were famous they would be pleased enough to see me. It is one of the rewards of the fame." She was silent for a moment, and then she added, "They are very poor."
"Those rewards! I have sometimes thought," Arnold said, "that you were not devoured by thirst for them."
"When we are together, you and I," she answered simply, "I never am."
He took it at its face value. They had had some delightful conversations. If her words awakened anything in him it was the remembrance of these. The solace of her companionship presented itself to him again, and her statement gave their mutual confidence another seal; that was all. They sat where they were for half an hour, and something like antagonism and displeasure toward the secretaries' wives settled upon them, for which Hilda, interrupting a glance or two from the ladies purring past, drew suspicion. "I am going now," she said. "It—it isn't quite suitable here," and there was just enough suggestion in the point of her fan to make him think of his frock. "It is an unpardonable truth that if we stay any longer I shall make people talk about you."
He turned astonished eyes upon her, eyes in which she remembered afterward there was absolutely nothing but a literal and pained apprehension of what she said. "You are a good woman," he exclaimed. "How could such a thing be possible?"
The faintest embarrassment, the merest suggestion of distress, came into her face and concentrated in her eyes, which she fixed upon him as if she would bring his words to the last analysis and answer him as she would answer a tribunal.
"A good woman?" she repeated. "I don't know—isn't that a refinement of virtue? No, standing on my sex, I make no claim, but as people go I am good. Yes, I am good."
"In my eyes you are splendid," he replied, content, and gave her his arm. They went together through the reception-rooms, and the appreciation of her grew in him. If in the bright and silken distance he had not seen his Bishop it might have glowed into a cordiality of speech with his distinctive individual stamp on it. But he saw his Bishop, his ceinture tightened on him, and he uttered only the trite saying about the folly of counting on the sensibility of swine.
"Yes," she laughed into her good-night to him, "but I'm not sure that it isn't better to be the pig than the pearl."