Lucia rose in wrath. How far it was genuine concerned herself only, but certainly some of it was.
"It comes to this, then," she said—"that you make vile insinuations, the nature of which I do not choose to guess, against my best friend, and then refuse to toll me what they are. I don't ask you again; the nature of the statement itself, whatever it is, doesn't interest me in the least. Luckily, since you do not tell me what it is all about, I can judge of the quality of what you have heard. That sort of stuff is dropped from the garret into the gutter. It only disgraces those who drop it, and defiles those who sit in the gutter. I do not, nor does she."
Lucia was conscious that her tongue was running away with her, and she stopped abruptly. Yet even as she stopped, hearing her own words in her head, she endorsed them. With all her huge faults, she at any rate lacked the scratching nails and forked tongue of the mischief-maker. She had the serene indulgence towards the doings of others which, though it may only spring from indifference to morals, is yet a factor in the world that makes for peace and pleasantness. But though she thoroughly approved her own sentiments, she realized that she had said enough, if not more than enough, and with the almost superhuman control that she had over herself she throw her anger from her.
She had risen, but now sat down again, and as if her passion had heated her, she cast back the little cape that she had on her shoulders, and unpinned her hat. Her mood changed altogether. She loaned forward towards him, her chin a little raised, almost suppliant.
"Oh, my dear," she said. "I know how all you have said to me is prompted by the best, the very best, motives, but it is such a mistake. Let us go to the root of it all. Has Madge had lovers, not her husband? I dare say. But what then? It doesn't concern either you or me. It is her own business. Supposing somebody came to me to-morrow, and told me you were—anything, thief, adulterer—do you suppose I should listen? Don't you understand? What concerns me about you is what I know of you—what you are to me, not what other people tell me about you. I don't care whether your informants are correct or not in what they tell you. It isn't my affair. That is all, I think. Let us dismiss the matter entirely. I will forget it."
But these few sentences of Lucia's, spoken so quietly after her
