"It's not love a girl wants, then?" she said struggling to curl her lip again. "It's not love, then, that a girl like me can want," she said.
She had stopped the loom and covered up her face in her hands.
"No, no," she added, with a stifled sob, "love is for ladies—fine ladies in silks and satins—pure—virtuous.... Christian," she exclaimed, dropping her hands and looking into his face with indignant eyes, "I suppose there's a sort of woman that wants nothing of a man but money, is there?"
Christian's lips were livid. "That's not what I meant, Mona, believe me," he said.
The loom was still. The sweet serenity of the air left hardly a sense of motion.
"You talk of your father, too," the girl continued, lifting her voice. "What of my mother? You don't think of her. No, but I do, and it goes nigh to making my heart bleed."
"Hush, Mona," whispered Christian; but, heedless of the warning, she continued:
"To be torn away from the place where she was born and bred, where kith and kin still live, where kith and kin lie dead—that was hard. But it would have been harder, far harder, to remain, with shame cast at her from every face, as it has been every day for these five years."
She paused. A soft boom came up to them from the sea, where the unruffled waters rested under the morning sun.
"Yes, we have both suffered," said Christian. "What I have suffered God knows. Yes, yes; the man who lives two lives knows what it is to suffer. Talk of crime! no need of that, as the good, goody, charitable world counts crime. Let it be only a hidden thing, that's enough. Only a secret, and yet how it kills the sunshine off the green fields!" Christian laughed—a hollow, hard, cynical laugh.