“You have not heard me out: you don’t understand. Edward, I know the first effect must be painful, but every word you will listen to will lessen that impression. I am, if you will remember, a little older than you are.”
“We were born, I think, in the same year.”
“That makes a woman much older. I told you so when it meant more. And I am a woman, more feeble of constitution than you are--not likely to live so long.”
“On the contrary, if you will allow me to interrupt you; women, I believe, as a rule, are longer-lived than men.”
She drew back with a pained and irritated look. “You make me feel like a lawyer supporting a weak case. It was not in this way that I wanted to talk it over with you, Edward.”
“To talk over the sacrifice of everything I have ever looked to--my birthright, and the prospects of my children. This is rather a large affair to be talked over between you and me after five-o’clock tea, Alicia, over a dying fire.”
“Then,” she said, “it would have been better I had not meddled at all, as my father always said. He thought it should have been made a business proposal only, through a solicitor. But I--I, like a foolish woman--remembering that we had once been dear friends, and feeling that I had been guilty of neglect, and perhaps unkindness--I would not have anything said till I had come myself, till I had made my little overture of reconciliation, till I--”
“If there is to be frankness on one side there should be frankness on both. Till you had put forth the old influence, which once would have made me do anything--give up anything--to please you.”
“You said,” she cried, provoked and humiliated, “not five minutes since, though I did not wish it--never thought of it--that you were my faithful servant still!”
“Yes,” he said; “and do you know what I should like to do now? You have come to ask me for my inheritance as you might ask for a flower out of my garden--if there were any! I should like to fling you your Penton into your apron--into your face--and see you carry it off, and point at you, like--you were always fond of poetry, and you will remember--the fellow that jumped among the lions for a glove--only a glove: only his life, don’t you know!”
It was not often that Edward Penton gave way to passion, and it was brutal, this that he said: but for the moment he had lost all control of himself.