“No; regarding herself.”
“Ah! A confession of a woman’s weakness—eh?”
“Its nature is immaterial,” she responded in a firm tone. “I was her most intimate friend, and she confided in me.”
“And because it concerns her personally, you refuse to divulge it?”
“I am a woman, Mr Statham, and I will not betray anything that reflects upon another woman’s honour.”
“Women are not usually so loyal to each other!” he remarked, not without a touch of sarcasm. “You appear to be unlike all the others I have known.”
“I am no better than anybody else, I suppose,” she replied. “Every woman must surely possess a sense of what is right and just.”
“Very few of them do,” the old man snarled, for woman was a subject upon which he always became bitterly sarcastic. In his younger days he had been essentially a ladies’ man, but the closed page in his history had surely been sufficient to sour him against the other sex.
The world, had it but known the truth, would not have pondered at Sam Statham’s hatred of society, and more especially the feminine element of it. But, like many another man, he was misjudged because he was compelled to conceal the truth, and was condemned unjustly because it was not permitted to him to make self-defence.
How many men—and women, too—live their lives in social ostracism, and perhaps disgrace, because for family or other reasons they are unable to exhibit to the world the truth. Many a man, and many a woman, who read these lines, are as grossly misjudged by their fellows as was Samuel Statham, the millionaire who was a pauper, the man who lived that sad and lonely life in his Park Lane mansion, daily gathering gold until he became crushed beneath the weight of its awful responsibility, his sole aim and relaxation being the mixing with the submerged workers of the city, and relieving them by secret philanthropy.