"Yes, I've
suspected, in dreadful moments of revelation, how far your undermining has
gone. And you say you are not changed!"
"Would you ask your mother never to marry again?"
"I would--if she were in any way to redeem her image in my eyes. But,
granting to the full that one must make concessions to such creatures of
the senses, I would ask her, at the very least, to have waited."
"Creatures of the senses!" Jack repeated in a helpless gasp; such words, in
their austere vocabulary, were hardly credible. "Do you know what you are
saying, you arrogant, you heartless girl?"
Her face seemed to flash at him like lightning from a black cloud, and with
the lightning a reality that had lacked before to leap to her voice:
"Ah! At last--at last you are saying what you have felt for a long time!
At last I know what you think of me! So be it! I don't retract one jot or
tittle of what I say. Mama is a perfectly moral woman, if you actually
imagine some base imputation; but she lives for the pleasant, the pretty,
the easy. She doesn't love this man's soul--nor care if he has one.
Her love for him is a parody of the love that my father taught me to
understand and to hold sacred. She loves his love for her; his 'delightful'
appearance. She loves his place and name and all the power and leisure of
the life he can give her. She loves the world--in him; and in that I mean
and repeat that she is a creature of the senses.
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