He did not remark how white, even against the pale shimmer of the lake, was the face that mocked him; and her heartlessness seemed dreadful to him.
“I wish,” he said, “to say only one thing on my own account.”
“There is only one thing you must not say,” she retorted, turning on him without warning and speaking with concentrated passion. “I have been, it may be, as foolish as you say. I am only nineteen. I may have been, I don’t know about that, very wicked—as wicked as you say. And what I have done in my folly and in my—you call it wickedness—may be a disgrace to my family. But I have done nothing, nothing, sir,”—she raised her head proudly—“to disgrace myself personally. Do you believe that?”
And then he did notice how white she was.
“If you tell me that, I do believe it,” he said gravely.
“You must believe it,” she rejoined with sudden vehemence. “Or you wrong me more cruelly than I have wronged you!”
“I do believe it,” he said, conquered for the time by a new emotion.
“Then now I will hear you,” she answered, her tone sinking again. “I will hear what you wish to say. Not that it will bend me. I have injured you. I own it, and am sorry for it on your account. On my own I am unhappy, but I had been more unhappy had I married you. You have been frank, let me be frank,” she continued, her eyes alight, her tone almost imperious. “You sought not a wife, but a mother for your child! A woman, a little better bred than a nurse, to whom you could entrust the one being, the only being, you love, with less chance of its contamination,” she laughed icily, “by the lower orders! If you had any other motive in choosing me it was that I was your second cousin, of your own respectable family, and you did not derogate. But you forgot that I was young and a woman, as you were a man. You said no word of love to me, you begged for no favour; when you entered a room, you sought my eye no more than another’s, you had no more softness for me than for another! If you courted me at all it was before others, and if you talked to me at all it was from the height of wise dullness, and about things I did not understand and things I hated! Until,” she continued viciously, “at last I hated you! What could be more natural? What did you expect?”
A little colour had stolen into his face under the lash of her reproaches. He tried to seem indifferent, but he could not. His tone was forced and constrained when he answered.
“You have strange ideas,” he said.