"But if I assure you that your acceptance of my offer would ease my conscience----"
"Nay, madam, your conscience may rest easy in the assurance that we are content----"
"I do not think your wife is content, Mr. Stobart. She received me just now as an enemy. Let me convince her that I am her friend."
"You can do that in a hundred ways, madam, without making her rich, which would be to be her enemy in disguise."
"Sure, your ladyship, I was full of sinfulness and pride when I spoke to you so uncivilly," Lucy said, in a contrite voice. "Mr. Stobart is a better judge of all serious matters than I am. I should never be clever if I lived to be a hundred, in spite of the pains he takes to teach me. And if he thinks we had best be poor, why, so do I; and this house is a palace compared with the hovel I lived in before he took me away from my father and mother."
"You hear, Lady Kilrush, my wife and I are of one mind. But to prove that 'tis for no stubborn pride that I reject your generous offer, I promise to appeal to your kindness at any hour of need, and, further, to call upon you once in a way for those charitable works in which the men I most honour are engaged. There is Mr. Whitefield's American Orphanage, for example----"
"Oh, command my purse, I pray you, sir. I rejoice in helping the poor--I who have known poverty. I will send you something for your orphans to-night. Let me assist all your good works."
"'Tis very generous of your ladyship to help us; for I doubt your own religious views scarcely tally with those of my friends."
"I have no religious views, Mr. Stobart. I have no religion except the love of my fellow-creatures."
"Great Heaven, madam, have the undermining influences of a corrupt society so early sapped your belief in Christ?"
"No, sir, society has not influenced me. I have never been a believer in Christianity as a creed, though I can admire Jesus of Nazareth as a philanthropist, and grieve for him as a martyr to the cruelty of man. I was taught to reason, where other children are taught to believe; to question and to think for myself, where other children are taught to be dumb and to stifle thought."
Stobart gazed at her with horror. Mrs. Stobart listened open-mouthed, astonished at the audacity which could give speech to such opinions.