“My dear madam, I intended no such imputation. But you were agitated and excited; and sometimes under the stress of our excitement we unwittingly exaggerate.”
“Well, I did not exaggerate. What I told you was literally true.”
“And the rest that you said? That also you re-affirm? That you are penniless, homeless, wretchedly unhappy, and weary of life? It seems brutal for me to state it thus; but I must understand clearly, for a purpose which you will presently see.”
“You need not apologise, sir. This is no occasion for mincing matters. Yes, I am penniless, homeless, wretchedly unhappy, and weary of life. But I am worse than that. I am bad. I am utterly base and degraded. Look at me,” she added, fixing her eyes boldly, even defiantly, upon mine. “Examine me. I am a rare specimen. Very probably you have never seen my like before, and never will again. I am an example of--” she paused and laughed; and there was something in her laughter that made me shudder--“of total depravity,” she concluded. Then suddenly her manner changed, and she became very grave. “Would you entertain a leper in your house, sir? Yet I have been told that I am a moral leper. I have been told that the corruption-spot upon me reaches in to the core. And I think my informant put it very moderately. If you suspected the crimes I have been guilty of, the worse crimes that I have meditated, and only failed to commit because of material obstacles that I could not overcome, you would not harbour me in your house for a single minute. You would feel that my presence was a contamination: that I polluted the chair I sit in, the floor under my feet. The glass I just drank from--you would shatter it into bits, that no innocent man or woman might ever put lips to it again. There! can't you see now that I am beyond help, beyond hope? What have I to live for? I am an incumbrance upon the face of the earth, and hateful to myself into the bargain. Why keep me here an hour? Let us rescind our compromise.* Let me go at once.”
* It is possible that here and elsewhere Dr. Benary, in reporting conversations from memory, puts into the mouths of his interlocutors words and phrases from his own vocabulary, at the same time, without doubt, giving the substance and the spirit of their remarks correctly. “Let us rescind our compromise,” at any rate, falling from the lips of a woman, has, to say the least, an unrealistic sound.---Editor.
