“No harm?” Mary replied, swept away by her feelings. “Is that enough? Because in this quiet corner, which is home to my uncle and a refuge to me, no call reaches you, is it enough that you do no harm? Is there no good to be done? Think, Mr. Basset! I am ignorant, a woman. But I know that to-day there are great questions calling for an answer, wrongs clamoring to be righted, a people in travail that pleads for ease! I know that there is work in England for men, for all! Work, that if there be any virtue left in ancient blood should summon you as with a trumpet call!”
He did not answer. Twice, early in her attack he had moved as if he would defend himself. Then he had let his chin fall and he had listened with his eyes on the table. And—but she had not seen it—he had more than once shivered under her words as under a lash. For he loved her and she scourged him. He loved her, he desired her, he had put her on a pedestal, and all the time she had been viewing him with the clear merciless eyes of youth, trying him by the standard of her dreams, probing his small pretensions, finding him a potterer in a library—he who in his vanity had raised his eyes to her and sought to be her hero!
It was a cruel lesson, cruelly given; and it wounded him to the heart. So that she, seeing too late that he made no reply, seeing the grayness of his face, and that he did not raise his eyes, had a too-late perception of what she had done, of how cruel she had been, of how much more she had said than she had meant to say. She stood conscience-stricken, remorseful, ashamed.
And then, “Oh, I am sorry!” she cried. “I am sorry! I should not have said that! You meant to honor me and I have hurt you.”
He looked up then, but neither the shadow nor the grayness left his face. “Perhaps it was best,” he said dully. “I am sure that you meant well.”
“I did,” she cried. “I did! But I was wrong. Utterly wrong!”
“No,” he said, “you were not wrong. The truth was best.”
“But perhaps it was not the truth,” she replied, anxious at once, miserably anxious to undo what she had done, to unsay what she had said, to tell him that she was conceited, foolish, a mere girl! “I am no judge—after all what do I know of these things? What have I done that I should say anything?”
“I am afraid that what is said is said,” he replied. “I have always known that I was no knight-errant. I have never been bold until to-day—and it has not answered,” with a sickly smile. “But we understand one another now—and I relieve you.”
He passed her on his way to the door, and she thought that he was going to hold it open for her to go out. But when he reached the door he fumbled for the handle, found it as a blind man might find it, and went out himself, without turning his head.