“Well, still, I’m not so sure about your obligation to tell it. If you could endure to keep it, you might have a greater right to keep it than I should have to know it. The only comfort of confession is that it seems to disown our wrong and make it a sort of public property, a part of evil in general, and lets us begin new, like people who have taken the benefit of the bankrupt law.” He spoke these truisms in a jesting tone. “I shall always be willing to adopt half of your sins. How have you been injuring me, Rosabel?” he asked, with the smile which Mrs. Farrell’s speculative seriousness was apt to call forth; the best men find it so hard to believe that a charming woman can be in earnest about anything but her good looks.
“Oh, I was supposing a case,” she answered, with a sigh. “You do think I have some faults, then?”
“Yes, I think you have; but that doesn’t make any difference.”
“But you can’t pretend you like them?”
“Let me think! Do I like your faults?”
“Don’t joke. Which do you think is the worst?” she demanded, stopping and confronting him with a look of solemnity which he found amusing.
“Upon my word,” he answered, with a laugh, “I don’t believe I could say.”
“What are any of my faults?”
“How can I tell?”
“Am I willful? Am I proud? Am I bad-tempered? What’s the thing you would find it hardest to forgive me?”