"Partly mine," Beth acknowledged. "I don't think I should have been so defiant. But if you had been different, I should have been different."
"If I had been different!" he ejaculated, knocking the ash from the end of his cigar. "Well, I'd like to know what fault you have to find with me? Different indeed!"
"That is the principal one," Beth answered, smiling. "Your great fault is that you don't believe you have any faults."
"Oh, well," he conceded, "of course I know I've my faults. Who hasn't? But I'll undertake to say that they're a man's faults. Now, come!"
This reflection seemed to deepen his self-satisfaction, as if it must be allowed that he was all the better for the faults to which he alluded. As he spoke, Beth seemed to see him at her wardrobe with his hand in the pocket of one of her dresses, hunting for treasonable matter to satisfy his evil suspicions, and she sighed. She would not acknowledge to herself that she was fighting for the impossible, yet even at the outset she half despaired of ever making him understand. It is pitiful to think of her, with her tender human nature, seeking a true mate where human law required that she should find one, only to be repulsed and baffled and bedraggled herself in the end if she persevered. A good man might have failed to comprehend Beth, but a good man would have felt the force of goodness in her, and would have reverenced her. Maclure recognised no force in her and felt no reverence; all that was not animal in her was as obscure to him as to the horse in his stable that whinnied a welcome to her when she came because he expected sugar. It is pleasant to give pleasure; but there must be more in marriage for it to be satisfactory than free scope to exercise the power to please.
"Well, look here, Dan," Beth pursued. "I'll make a bargain with you. If you will do your best to correct your faults—what I think your faults—I'll do my best to correct all you find in me. Only let us discuss them temperately, and try conscientiously to live up to some ideals of thought and conduct."
Dan smoked on silently for a little, then he said, with some show of irritation tempering his self-satisfaction, "Well, all I can say is, I cannot for the life of me see what you have to complain of."
"I have to complain of your conduct with Bertha Petterick, for one thing," Beth answered desperately. "Let us be frank with each other. I know that you have not been loyal to me. I saw you together here on this seat the day you gave her the bracelet. I saw you put it on her arm and kiss her; and that decided me to go to Ilverthorpe."
Dan looked round about him with an altered countenance, but nothing that he knew to be a window overlooked the spot, neither was it possible to see through the thickness of the privet hedge, nor from any other point, without being seen.
"You must have imagined it!" he exclaimed.