"What is the good of pity?" he asked rudely. "Pity cannot alter things. Pity cannot make things which are as if they are not. You seem to me to have done what you have done knowing well what you were doing, and knowing what you were going to get by it. You have got one of the very best houses in London; you have got a rich husband; you have got an excellent position; and you have got—Mrs. Cassilis, you have got a child, whose future happiness depends upon your reticence."
"I will tell you what I have besides," she burst in, with passion. "I have the most intolerable husband, the most maddening and exasperating man in all the world!"
"Is he cruel to you?"
"No; he is kind to me. If he were cruel I should know how to treat him. But he is kind."
"Heroics, Mrs. Cassilis. Most women could very well endure a kind husband. Are you not overdoing it? You almost make me remember a scene—call it a dream—which took place in a certain Glasgow hotel about four years and a half ago."
"In the City he is the greatest financier living, I am told. In the house he is the King of Littleness."
"I think there was—or is—a bishop," said Lawrence meditatively, "who gave his gigantic intellect to a Treatise on the Sinfulness of Little Sins. Perhaps you had better buy that work and study it. Or present it to your husband."
"Very well, Lawrence. I suppose you think you have a right to laugh at me?"
"Right! Good God, Mrs. Cassilis," he cried, in the greatest alarm, "do you think I claim any right—the smallest—over you? If I ever had a right it is gone now—gone, by your own act, and my silence."
"Yes, Lawrence," she repeated, with a hard smile on her lips, "your silence."