“Let me go!”
“You are as inexperienced as a child, Glory, and it is my duty to protect you against yourself.”
“Let go, I say!”
“Don't destroy yourself. Think while there's time—think of your good name, your character!”
“I shall do as I please.”
“Listen! If I have chosen to be a clergyman, it's not because I've lived all my life in cotton wool. Let me tell you what the lives of such men really are—the best of them, the very best. He gets up at noon, walks in the park, takes tea with some one, grunts and groans that he must go to somebody's dinner party, escapes to the Gaiety Theatre, sups at a so-called club——”
“You mean Lord Robert. But what right have you to say——”
“The right of one who knows him to be as bad as this, and worse—ten times worse! Such a man thinks he has a right to play with a girl if she is poor. She may stake her soul, her salvation, but he risks nothing. To-day he trifles with her; to-morrow he marries another, and flings her to the devil!”
“There's something else in this. What is it?”
But John Storm had swung about and left her.