Longville stirred restlessly. Actually he dared not strike his wife, but he had all the impulse to do so. He resorted to hoary argument.
"’Tis the unselfish, the noble woman who saves—man!" he muttered, half ashamed of his own words.
At this Marcel laughed openly. Something was rising to the surface, something that life had taught her.
"It’s a poor argument to use when the unworthy one is the gainer by a woman’s unselfishness," retorted Marcel. "Unless she, too, gets something out of her—her nobleness, I should think a man would hate to fling it always in her teeth."
Longville half rose; his jaw looked ugly.
"’Tis my purpose," he said slowly, harshly, "to marry Mam’selle and Pierre. I have my reasons, and if you cannot help you can keep out of the way!"
"Yes, I can do that," murmured Marcel. She had taken up her knitting and she rarely spoke while she knitted. She thought!
But if Longville’s suggestion seemed to die in the mind of his own woman, it had no such fate in that of Jo Morey. When she went into her orderly house, after leaving the Captain, she put her papers on the table and stood staring ahead into space. She seemed waiting for the ugly thought he had left to follow its creator, but instead it clung to her like a stinging nettle.
"Buy a husband!" she repeated; "buy a husband."
Into poor Jo’s dry and empty heart the words ate their way like a spark in the autumn’s brush. The flame left a blackened trail over which she toiled drearily back, back to that one blessed taste she had had of love and happiness. Memories, long considered dead, rose from their shallow graves like spectres, claiming Mam’selle for their own at last.
She had believed herself beyond suffering. She had thought that loneliness and hard labour had secured her at least from the agony she was now enduring, but with the consciousness that she could feel as she was feeling, a sort of terror overcame her.
Her past days of toil had been blessed with nights of exhausted slumber. But with the newly-won freedom there would be hours when she must succumb to the tortures of memory. She could not go on slaving with no actual need to spur her, she must have a reason, a motive for existence. Like many another, poor Jo realized that while she had plenty to retire on, she had nothing to retire to, for in her single purpose of freeing herself from Longville, she had freed herself from all other ties.
