Page:The Galaxy, Volume 5.djvu/296

284 breathed in all these years but falsehood? Steven," abruptly, "from the day I was fourteen I have been taught that the greatest virtue for me was falsehood, and so I've come to learn—yes, living in the Dene, in the wholesome atmosphere, you will say, of an English fireside, to look upon respectability as a sham, upon love as a sham (haven't I been a spectator of Arabella's marriage, of Katharine's engagement?) And now here in Paris—you won't believe me, I'm condemned, still I choose to speak—here in Paris, amid 'frivolity,' 'dissipation,' with men and women neither possessing nor pretending to possess high moral character for my companions, I've seen something nearer approaching to truth than I ever saw since I left the borders of the Bièvre, sixteen years ago!"

And upon this—for desperation was on her: the desperation most creatures feel when they stand at bay, hard-pressed, irrevocable destruction lying close beneath their feet—Dora Lawrence told her husband all. Told, not without a certain degree of pathos, the story of her early orphaned years; of the hard work, the straitened pleasures of her childhood; of the Mère Mauprat, and the Squire's rescue; of her stunted girlish years at the Dene. "And in my whole life I've never known what love was, but from Kate," she finished, at last—Steven standing stone still listening to her. "Uncle Frank took me to his roof, sheltered, clothed, fed me—a piece of duty he owed to his wife's niece, of course, but performed with the same constitutional skin-deep kind-heartedness he would have shown to any miserable, stray animal that had come across his path. Aunt Arabella, a religious woman, accepted me—as her cross. Later on you married me! half out of pity, half pique, who shall say? Not a doubt, my conscience is a warped one. Not a doubt, as Shilohite notions go, for a woman in this dress to appear, against her husband's wishes, before two hundred spectators, is an un-Christian spectacle. To me life, altogether, is such a masquerade that I don't know where righteous falsehood ends, and where immoral truth begins. There, I've said my say. Now, decide for me as you choose." And, by a quick side-movement, she gained the centre of the room, and looked up, with tight-clasped hands, with eager eyes, and parted quivering lips, into her husband's face.

And Steven wavered. She was not a bad actress, poor Dot, in her small fashion! Could give sharp enough random pin-pricks at the confusion of right and wrong in human life, which to larger minds is the mournfulest mystery of our existence, never a mark for pointed little facile cynicisms. But it was not the acting, not the prettily-clasped hands, the quivering lip—not the shallow special pleading which made Steven waver. Sophisms as to the difficulty