“I suppose Sheila has been complaining to you, then?” said Lavender, hotly.
“You may suppose what absurdities you like,” said Ingram, quietly; “but it would be a good deal better if you would listen to me patiently, and deal in a common sense fashion with what I have got to say. It is nothing very desperate. Nothing has happened that is not of easy remedy, while the remedy would leave you and her in a much better position, both as regards your own estimation of yourselves and the opinion of your friends.”
“You are a little roundabout, Ingram,” said Lavender, “and ornate. But I suppose all lectures begin so. Go on.”
Ingram laughed: “If I am too formal it is because I don’t want to make mischief by any exaggeration. Look here! A long time before you were married I warned you that Sheila had very keen and sensitive notions about the duties that people ought to perform, about the dignity of labor, about the proper occupations of a man, and so forth. These notions you may regard as romantic and absurd, if you like, but you might as well try to change the color of her eyes as attempt to alter any of her beliefs in that direction.”
“And she thinks that I am idle and indolent because I don’t care what a washerwoman pays for her candles?” said Lavender, with impetuous contempt. “Well, be it so. She is welcome to her opinion. But if she is grieved at heart because I can’t make hob-nailed boots, it seems to me that she might as well come and complain to myself, instead of going and detailing her wrongs to a third person, and calling for his sympathy in the character of an injured wife.”
For an instant the dark eyes of the man opposite him blazed with a quick fire, for a sneer at Sheila was worse than an insult to himself; but he kept quite calm, and said, “That, unfortunately, is not what is troubling her.”
Lavender rose abruptly, took a turn up and down the empty room, and said, “If there is anything the matter, I prefer to hear it from herself. It is not respectful to me that she should call in a third person to humor her whims and fancies.”
“Whims and fancies!” said Ingram, with that dark light returning to his eyes. “Do you know what you are talking about? Do you know that while you are living on the charity of a woman you despise, and dawdling about the skirts of a woman who laughs at you, you are breaking the heart of a girl who has not her equal in England? Whims and fancies! Good God, I wonder how she ever could have—”
He stopped, but the mischief was done. These were not prudent words to come from a man who wished to step in as a mediator between husband and wife; but Ingram’s blaze of wrath, kindled by what he considered the insufferable insolence of Lavender in thus speaking of Sheila, had swept all notions of prudence before it. Lavender, indeed, was much cooler than he was, and said, with an affectation of carelessness, “I am sorry you should vex yourself so much about Sheila. One would think you had had the ambition yourself, at some time or other, to play the part of husband to her; and doubtless then you would have made sure that all her idle fancies were gratified. As it is, I was about to relieve you from the trouble of further explanation by saying that I am quite competent to manage my own affairs, and that if Sheila has any complaint to make she must make it to me.”
Ingram rose, and was silent for a moment.