"Your letters and most secret papers would by this time be exposed to the eyes of the police.... No, no, my child; calm yourself, be seated; thanks to my intervention, this will not occur."
Roma looked at him, and found him more repulsive to her at that moment than he had ever been before. Even his daintiness repelled her—the modified perfume about his clothes, his waxed moustache, his rounded finger-nails, and all the other refinements of the man who loves himself and sets out to please the senses of women.
"You will allow, my dear, that I have had sufficient to humiliate me without this further experience. A ward who persistently disregards the laws of propriety and exposes herself to criticism in the most ordinary acts of life was surely a sufficient trial. But that was not enough. Almost as soon as you have passed out of my legal control you join with those who are talking and conspiring against me."
Roma continued to sit with a gloomy and defiant face.
"How am I to defend myself against the humiliations you put upon me in your own mind? You give me no chance to defend myself. I cannot know what others have told you. I know no more than you repeat to me, and that is nothing at all."
Roma was biting her compressed lips and breathing audibly.
"How am I to defend myself against the humiliations I suffer in the minds of the public? There is only one way, and that is to allow it to be believed that, in spite of all appearances, you are still playing a part, that you are going to all lengths to punish the enemy who traduced you and publicly degraded you."
Roma tried to laugh, but the laugh was broken in her throat by a rising sob.
"I have only to whisper that, dear friend, and society, at all events, will credit it. Already it knows the very minute details of your life, and it will believe that when you threw away every shred of propriety and went to live in that man's apartment, it was only in order to play the old part—shall I say the Scriptural part?—of possessing yourself of the inmost secrets of his soul."
The clear, sharp whisper in which the Baron spoke his last words cut Roma like a knife. She threw up her head with scorn.