"Nearer--and dearer, Mrs. Cassilis? What a foolish world it was! Suppose we had become nearer, and therefore very much less dear."
"I will be whatever you like, Mrs. Cassilis--except what I was--provided you do not call me Lawrence any more. Come, let us be reasonable. The past is gone; in deference to your wishes I removed myself from the scene; I went abroad; I transported myself for four years; then I saw the announcement of your marriage in the paper by accident. And I came home again, because of your own free will and accord you had given me my release. Is this true?"
"Then, in the name of Heaven, why seek to revive the past? Believe me, I have forgotten the few days of madness and repentance. They are gone. Some ghosts of the past come to me, but they do not take the shape of Victoria Pengelley."
"Then we _must_ forget. Victoria--Mrs. Cassilis, rouse yourself. Think of what you are--what you have made yourself."
"You have a husband and a child; you have your position in the world. Mrs. Cassilis, you have your honour."
"My honour!" she echoed. "What honour? And if all were known! Lawrence, don't you even pity me?"
"What is the good of pity?" he asked rudely. "Pity cannot alter things. Pity cannot make things which are as if they are not. You seem to me to have done what you have done knowing well what you were doing, and knowing what you were going to get by it. You have got one of the very best houses in London; you have got a rich husband; you have got an excellent position; and you have got--Mrs. Cassilis, you have got a child, whose future happiness depends upon your reticence."
"I will tell you what I have besides," she burst in, with passion. "I have the most intolerable husband, the most maddening and exasperating man in all the world!"
"No; he is kind to me. If he were cruel I should know how to treat him. But he is kind."
"Heroics, Mrs. Cassilis. Most women could very well endure a kind husband. Are you not overdoing it? You almost make me remember a scene--call it a dream--which took place in a certain Glasgow hotel about four years and a half ago."
"In the City he is the greatest financier living, I am told. In the house he is the King of Littleness."
"I think there was--or is--a bishop," said Lawrence meditatively, "who gave his gigantic intellect to a Treatise on the Sinfulness of Little Sins. Perhaps you had better buy that work and study it. Or present it to your husband."