“It has always seemed to me,” said Mr Burgrave, “that in this meeting between Paracelsus and Aprile, whose characteristics are so essentially feminine, the poet has typified for all time the union of the masculine and feminine elements in human nature. Woman—the creature of feeling, man—the creature of reason, neither complete without the other. Before perfection can be attained, the lover must learn to know, the knower to love.”
“All women are not creatures of feeling,” said Mabel.
“But you would scarcely say that any woman was a creature of reason? Such a—a person would not be a woman. She would be a monstrosity.”
“I mean that I don’t think you can divide people by hard and fast lines in that way. It’s perfectly possible for a man to be a creature of feeling, and I know women who are quite as reasonable as any man.”
“Pardon me; you don’t altogether follow my argument. I yield to no one in my admiration of the conclusions at which women arrive. They are often—one might say very often—astonishingly correct, but they are purely the result of a leap in the dark, and not of any process of reasoning. And since this is so, no wise man can feel safe in acting upon them, while where the lady—as is not infrequently the case with her charming sex—is biassed by her personal feelings, they are liable to be dangerously deceptive.”
Mabel closed the book with a bang. “I wonder,” she said angrily, “at your talking in this way, as if I wasn’t horribly humiliated enough already. It was simply a chance that I didn’t identify the right men, and I know just the same that it was Bahram Khan who employed them.”
Mr Burgrave raised his eyebrows slightly. “Indeed, my dear Miss North, you must pardon my maladroitness. I assure you that I had no intention whatever of alluding to the—let us say the disagreeable incident of yesterday. I was dealing purely with generalities.”
“But you yourself know perfectly well—though you pretend not to think so—that it was Bahram Khan,” persisted Mabel.
The Commissioner raised himself on his elbow and looked straight at her, and Mabel quailed. “And is it possible,” he demanded, “that you believe I am deliberately sheltering from justice, contrary to the dictates of my own conscience, a wretch who has dared to raise his hand against an Englishwoman—against a lady for whom I have the highest regard? No, Miss North, you must be good enough to withdraw those words. Even your brother and his wife are sufficiently just to believe me an honourable man, although we differ on so many points.”
The stern blue eyes under the lowering brows seemed to pierce Mabel through and through. She half rose from her chair, then sat down again, and repressed with difficulty a threatened burst of tears.