The woman had turned to ashen paleness. The ever-repeating and distributing electric light had forgotten the delicate tints of her dainty gown, and the color of her hair and brows, with the roses upon her bosom, and only the waxen face, with its dark eyes filled with glistening tears, uprose whiter than the beams.
“Poor heart!” said he, noting the quiver of the sensitive mouth. “It ought not to be so difficult to speak the truth.”
At length the tortured woman found voice:—
“David Morning,” she said, in tremulous tones, “I am not meaning to question your right to give challenge to my despair, though, for reasons you can understand, it is from you, more than from all the world, I would have disguised it. You ask me if I love that man? I answer, No, no, a thousand times no! But my sense of obligation as his wife is as much stronger than my hate as misery is stronger than the social bars which contain it, and I deem it neither noble nor just to utter complaints against one who is, whatever may be said, my legal protector before the world. I do not deny that I have suffered untold agonies, but I may as well bear them in one cause as another.”
“I confess,” said Morning, with a manner suddenly grown cold, “I do not fully understand you. You speak of ‘obligations,’ and ‘social bars;’ you cannot mean that you would deliberately sacrifice your woman’s soul, with all its honor and its aims, to a life of dishonor and deceit—for so I dare to name it—for dread of the idle dictum of a malicious social scarecrow?”
The baroness winced, but quickly rallied, and, leaning forward in her chair, so near that he caught the perfume of the roses on her corsage, she replied:—
“No! though I will say in passing that, whatever I might do, no woman, be she termagant or angel, has ever lived long enough to escape the opprobrium arising from the poisonous effluvia of the divorce courts! However, that is not the subject under discussion, and my unhappy feet are placed upon more tenable ground. I confess myself, then, not strong enough to defy the convictions of a life given much—the maturer portion, at least—to an examination of the ethics of the question. And I resolutely affirm that, in my own mind, I am convinced that to seek to evade the results of my own deliberate action, would be sinful, and in violation of my own conscientious perceptions—‘a grieving of the Spirit,’ in the language of a very old author, and, therefore, a sin against the Holy Ghost.”
Is it possible, thought Morning, forgetful for the moment of the purpose that had brought him there, that in this evening of the nineteenth century a cultivated woman, herself the victim of a system fiendish in its power to forge public opinion, and cruel as the Inquisition, should have the courage thus to look her awful destiny in the face tranquilly, and smilingly set upon it the cold white seal of conscience? And for a brief moment he wondered if she were a saint or a lunatic.
Then he thought of the many shafts of argument that might be let loose to pierce the diseased cuticle of her morbid philosophy, but he had not the heart, or, rather, he lacked entire faith in their efficacy, so he sat silently counting his heart beats. Finally, taking alarm at his protracted silence, she resumed:—
“Do not misunderstand me; I am not narrow enough to convict, or egotist enough to try to convert, others to my way of thinking; I only speak for myself.”