his own hand, under the present favourable circumstances. Then she cries again. Then she is enraged again, and makes some mention of swindlers. Finally, she sits down crying on a block of stone, and is in all the known and unknown humours of her sex at once. Pending her changes, those aforesaid marks in his face have come and gone, now here now there, like white stops of a pipe on which the diabolical performer has played a tune. Also his livid lips are parted at last, as if he were breathless with running. Yet he is not.
“Now, get up, Mrs Lammle, and let us speak reasonably.”
She sits upon her stone, and takes no heed of him.
“Get up, I tell you.”
Raising her head, she looks contemptuously in his face, and repeats, “You tell me! Tell me, forsooth!”
She affects not to know that his eyes are fastened on her as she droops her head again; but her whole figure reveals that she knows it uneasily.
“Enough of this. Come! Do you hear? Get up.”
Yielding to his hand, she rises, and they walk again; but this time with their faces turned towards their place of residence.
“Mrs Lammle, we have both been deceiving, and we have both been deceived. We have both been biting, and we have both been bitten. In a nut-shell, there’s the state of the case.”
“You sought me out—”
“Tut! Let us have done with that. We know very well how it was. Why should you and I talk about it, when you and I can’t disguise it? To proceed. I am disappointed and cut a poor figure.”
“Am I no one?”
“Some one — and I was coming to you, if you had waited a moment. You, too, are disappointed and cut a poor figure.”
“An injured figure!”
“You are now cool enough, Sophronia, to see that you can’t be injured without my being equally injured; and that therefore the mere word is not to the purpose. When I look back, I wonder how I can have been such a fool as to take you to so great an extent upon trust.”
“And when I look back —” the bride cries, interrupting.
“And when you look back, you wonder how you can have been — you’ll excuse the word?”
“Most certainly, with so much reason.”
“— Such a fool as to take me to so great an extent upon trust. But the folly is committed on both sides. I cannot get rid of you; you cannot get rid of me. What follows?”
“Shame and misery,” the bride bitterly replies.
“I don’t know. A mutual understanding follows, and I think it may carry us through. Here I split my discourse (give me your arm, Sophronia), into three heads, to make it shorter and plainer. Firstly, it’s enough to have been done, without the mortification of being known to have been done. So we agree to keep the fact to ourselves. You agree?”