the truth, Anson; and it's the truth that interests me to-night. Let me be free, Anson. . . . Let me go while being free still means something."
Perhaps if she had thrown herself at his feet in the attitude of a wretched, shameful woman, if she had made him feel strong and noble and heroic, she would have won; but it was a thing she could not do. She could only go on being coldly reasonable.
"And you would give up all this?" he was saying. "You'd leave Pentlands and all it stands for to marry this cheap Irishman . . . a nobody, the son perhaps of an immigrant dock-laborer."
"He is the son of a dock-laborer," she answered quietly. "And his mother was a housemaid. He's told me so himself. And as to all this. . . . Why, Anson, it doesn't mean anything to me . . . nothing at all that I can't give up, nothing which means very much. I'm fond of your father, Anson, and I'm fond of you when you are yourself and not talking about what a gentleman would do. But I'd give it all up . . . everything . . . for the sake of this other thing."
For a moment his lips moved silently and in agitation, as if it were impossible for him to answer things so preposterous as those his wife had just spoken. At last he was able to say, "I think you must have lost your mind, Olivia . . . to even think of asking such a thing of me. You've lived here long enough to know how impossible it is. Some of us must make a stand in a community. There has never been a scandal, or even a divorce, in the Pentland family . . . never. We've come to stand for something. Three hundred years of clean, moral living can't be dashed aside so easily. . . . We're in a position where others look up to us. Can't you see that? Can't you understand such a responsibility?"
For a moment she had a terrible, dizzy, intoxicating sense of power, of knowing that she held the means of destroying
