“You say it as from them?”
“I do. I have said indeed less than they bade me say. And not more, I believe on my honour, than the occasion requires. A young gentlewoman,” he continued bitterly, “brought up in the country with every care, sheltered from every temptation, with friends, with home, with every comfort and luxury, and about to be married to a gentleman in her own rank in life, meets secretly, clandestinely, shamefully a man, the lowest of the low, on a par in refinement with her own servants, but less worthy! She deceives with him her friends, her family, her relatives! If”—with some emotion—“I have overstated one of these things, God forgive me!”
“Pray go on!” she said, with her face averted. And thinking that she was utterly hardened, utterly without heart, thinking that her outward calm spelled callousness, and that she felt nothing, he did continue.
“Can she,” he said, “who has been so deceitful herself, complain if the man deceives her? She has chosen a worthless creature before her family and her friends? Is she not richly served if he treats her after his own nature and her example? If, after stooping to the lawless level of such a poor thing, she finds herself involved in his penalties, and her name a scandal and a shame to her family!”
“Is that all?” she asked. But not a quiver of the voice, not a tremour of the shoulders, betrayed what she was feeling, what she suffered, how fiercely the brand was burning into her soul.
“That is all they bade me say,” he replied in a calmer and more gentle tone. “And that they would make arrangements—such arrangements as may be possible for your future. But they would not take you back.”
“And now—what on your own account?” she asked, almost flippantly. “Something, I suppose?”
“Yes,” he said, answering her slowly, and with a steady look of condemnation. For in all honesty the girl’s attitude shocked and astonished him. “I have something to say on my own account. Something. But it is difficult to say it.”
She turned to him and raised her eyebrows.
“Really!” she said. “You seem to speak so easily.”