“Oh, Thornton, you mustn't say things like that!” said Clytie, with a queer little catch at her throat. “They hurt me!”
“Well, you mustn't deserve them,” replied Thornton. And then, mollifying at the sight of her distress: “You don't understand these things, little wife.”
“Well, never mind, dear,” said Clytie. “Perhaps it was foolish of me. I ought to have considered you; I didn't think of it. She kissed my hand the last time I saw her, and it would have seemed base and hypocritical to have cut her dead to-day. It seemed such a little matter. Why hurt the girl's feelings? That's why I did it.”
“Feelings?” echoed Thornton, with a laugh. “Bah! my good child, you are talking nonsense. She put her feelings up the spout years ago to get herself champagne and diamonds and the rest of it. With her soul sold to the devil and her body to men, what the deuce is she going to do with feelings?”
“What I saw of her was very human, Thornton. And if such women are brutes, it is men who make them so. If men were only kinder and tenderer——”
“Like the sentimental idiot in 'Jenny.' That's a poem about it, you know.”
“Yes—Rossetti; I am very fond of it,” she replied, with a half smile, wondering somewhat at his explanation. Then she added: “But surely there's humanity in every human being.”
“That's a very sweet, innocent belief, and you had better keep to it, my dear.”
“Oh, Thornton, I'm not an ignorant little schoolgirl,” she said, with hurt vanity. “I have learned something of the world. Perhaps I have been too eager to acquaint myself with things.”
“Anyhow, you can't know much about them,” he replied shortly. “Leave such things alone. They don't concern you, so what's the good of prying into them?”