"Of course he had. Gregory Williams, with all his faults, was a wide-awake man. I always said that."
Lyons completed the reading and murmured with a sigh, which was half pity, half grateful acknowledgment of his own good fortune--"It's a bad piece of business. I'm glad I had the sense to act promptly."
Selma was ruminating. Her steel bright eyes shone with exultation. Her sense of righteousness was gratified and temporarily appeased. "They'll have to sell their house, of course, and give up their horses and steam-yacht? I don't see why it doesn't mean that Flossy and her husband must come down off their pedestal and begin over again? It follows, doesn't it, that the heartless set into which they have wormed their way will drop them like hot coals?"
All these remarks were put by Selma in the slightly interrogative form, as though she were courting any argument to the contrary which could be adduced in order to knock it in the head. But Lyons saw no reason to differ from her verdict. "It means necessarily great mortification for them and a curtailment of their present mode of life," he said. "I am sorry for them."
"Sorry? Of course, James, it is distressing to hear that misfortune has befallen any person of one's acquaintance, and so far as Gregory Williams himself is concerned I have no wish to see him punished simply because he has been worldly and vainglorious. You thought him able in a business way, and liked to meet him. But as for her, Flossy, his wife," Selma continued, with a gasp, "it would be sheer hypocrisy for me to assert that I am sorry for her. I should deem myself unworthy of being considered an earnest-minded American woman if I did not maintain that this disgrace which has befallen them is the logical and legitimate consequence of their godless lives--especially of her frivolity and presumptuous indifference to spiritual influences. That woman, James, is utterly hostile to the things of the spirit. You have no conception--I have never told you, because he was your friend, and I was willing to let bygones be bygones on the surface on your account--you have no conception of the cross her behavior became to me in New York. From almost the first moment we met I saw that we were far apart as the poles in our views of the responsibilities of life. She sneered at everything which you and I reverence, and she set her face against true progress and the spread of American principles. She claimed to be my friend, and to sympathize with my zeal for social truth, yet all the time she was toadying secretly the people whose luxurious exclusiveness made me tremble sometimes for the future of our country. She and her husband were prosperous, and everything he touched seemed to turn to gold. It may sound irreverent, James, but there was a time during my life in New York when I was discouraged; when it seemed as though heaven were mocking me and my husband in our homely struggle against the forces of evil, and bestowing all its favors on a woman whose example was a menace to American womanhood! Sorry? Why should I be sorry to see justice triumph and shallow iniquity rebuked? I would give Florence Williams money if she is in want, but I am thankful, very thankful, that her heartless vanity has found its proper reward."