Muriel colored, but very slightly, and only for a moment.
“I shall visit them,” she said, quietly, “and I would have visited them before if I had heard of this. What is more, Susan is as good a girl as ever breathed, and I shall make it a point to invite her to come and spend a month at my house.”
Witherlee looked perfectly immobile, but secretly stung by the rebuke Muriel’s words conveyed to him, he felt the necessity of defending his attitude toward the Hollingsworths.
“I should be glad to still visit Miss Hollingsworth, if I could conscientiously,” he said, with an air of cold and lofty virtue. “But when a young lady lets herself be led astray by an ignis fatuus light, from the paths of Christian morality”—
The generous color flashed to the calm face of Muriel, and her golden eyes glowed on him so suddenly that he stopped in the middle of his sentence.
“Fernando Witherlee,” said she, in a slow and steady voice, and with a dignity that abashed even him, “if there is anything that could make me despise a fellow-creature, it would be such a speech as you have just made. Ignis fatuus light! I answer you with Robert Burns, and I accept it in a profounder sense than he did, that even the light that leads astray is light from Heaven. Christian morality! Who was the friend even of the Magdalen?—who was the friend and companion of publicans and sinners—the taboo men and women of old Jerusalem? Oh, shame upon you! A poor girl loving with the whole fervor of the sacred nature God gave her, guilty, at the most, only of a too absolute confidence in the traitor she had cast her heart upon, deceived now and abandoned, and suffering not only from her own private anguish, the greatest a human heart can know, but from the insolent and infamous scorn of society—and it is at such a time that you can have the soul to avoid her! And worse—you can tell the cruel treatment she receives from her sex and laugh. Those graceless women—but I may well spare my indignation at the inhuman way women treat any of their number who have fallen from what they call virtue. Shut out by the impudent assumptions of mankind from public life—shut out from that experience which widens the understanding, and thus, as the statesman said, corrects the heart—theirs may well be twilight judgments! Well may they have constricted minds and narrow souls, with life’s best culture denied them! Treated as vassals, theirs are vassals’ vices. But you—a man! And society! Society whose mutual voice should peal consolation and encouragement to this poor forlorn one, howling her off into social exile, and, were she poor, to a life of shame—howling her self-respect, her very womanhood out of her. Oh, what can I say of such a society! No matter. You can do as you think best; but I, for one, will never taboo Susan Hollingsworth, and she shall visit me if I can persuade her”
Wincing secretly under this rebuke, which Muriel uttered calmly, but with impressive energy, Witherlee sat in silence, with his opaque eyes fixed on vacancy, and his handsome eyebrows lifted very high. Harrington, without taking his gaze from him, expressed his gratification at what Muriel had said by laying his large hand over hers, as it rested on the arm of her chair. Emily sat with a dazed look, and her lover was biting his lip all through the episode, to suppress any signs of the satisfaction he felt at Witherlee’s discomfiture.
“My sentiments exactly, Muriel,” said Wentworth. “But now, Fernando, to resume. You appear to have cleared yourself of any blame in the construction Emily put upon your words, and so far so good. But there are some other things I want to talk with you about.”
“Proceed,” said Witherlee, coolly. “Though I really think Emily ought to be permitted to make the apologies she was about to make to me for so grievous an injury to my feelings as I have sustained.”
It is utterly impossible to describe the exquisite titillation of insult which, despite his subdued manner, these words of Witherlee conveyed. Wentworth reddened like fire instantly, and was only checked in a tremendous retort by a glance from the quiet eye of Muriel. But poor Emily, filled with contrition, started and colored, and was about to pour forth a profuse apology, when—