"I hadn't mentioned you or Dr. O'Grady," said Lord Manton. "But come now, Miss Blow, be reasonable. If he has run away from you, he wouldn't be the only man that has. You can't deny that Mr. Goddard ran away from you. He did it twice. You said so yourself. In fact, you more than hinted that he was in the act of a third flight when you caught him. There's nothing inherently absurd in supposing that one man would do what another man has done several times. I needn't say I wouldn't do it myself. But that's another matter. It's far better for you to look facts straight in the face, however unpleasant they are."
Whether Miss Blow looked at the facts or not, the facts as Lord Manton represented them, she certainly looked at Mr. Goddard. It seemed for a moment as if she was about to re-open the question of his flight to Ballymoy and his subsequent flight back again to Clonmore. He felt greatly annoyed with Lord Manton for calling fresh attention to these performances. There ought, he was convinced, to be some limit to the extent to which a man may give away his friends. But Miss Blow recognized that these hurried flittings of his and the causes of them were side issues. She got back, with an evident effort, to the main point immediately under discussion.
"And why should you suppose that the husbands of the ladies you have shut up in your drawing-room have run away from them?"
It was of Lord Manton that she asked the question; but Mr. Goddard answered her. He saw his opportunity and seized it. Having been sacrificed more than once as a burnt-offering to Miss Blow's wrath, he was perfectly ready, now he got the chance, to show up Lord Manton, as a man who also deserved strong denunciation.
"Lord Manton says," said Mr. Goddard, "that their husbands couldn't bear to live with them any more, because they were ordinary women and----"
"As well as I recollect," said Lord Manton, "it was you who used the word 'ordinary.' I hadn't seen the ladies at the time. For that matter, I haven't seen them yet."
"And," said Mr. Goddard, speaking slowly and with emphasis, "because they wear red dressing-gowns and wash their teeth."
He glanced at Lord Manton with an expression of triumph on his face. Miss Blow stared first at one of the men before her and then at the other. She was amazed. In spite of the white heat of her virtuous indignation she was reduced for the moment to a silence of sheer astonishment. The nature of the charge brought against the wives of the Members of Parliament took her aback. It was totally unexpected.