Her words were a cold shock to my emotion--my superficial emotion;
though, indeed, for that moment she seemed adorable to me. Without any
apparent relevancy, but certainly because my thoughts in self-reproach
were hovering about cabin 116 Intermediate, I said, with a biting shame,
"I do not wonder now!"

"You do not wonder at what?" she questioned; and she laid her hand
kindly on my arm.

I put the hand away a little childishly, and replied, "At men going to
the devil." But this was not what I thought.

"That does not sound complimentary to somebody. May I ask you what you
mean?" she said calmly. "I mean that Anson loved his wife, and she did
not love him; yet she held him like a slave, torturing him at the same
time."

"Does it not strike you that this is irrelevant? You are not my husband
--not my slave. But, to be less personal, Mr. Anson's wife was not
responsible for his loving her. Love, as I take it, is a voluntary
thing. It pleased him to love her--he would not have done it if it did
not please him; probably his love was an inconvenient thing domestically
--if he had no tact."

"Of that," I said, "neither you nor I can know with any certainty. But,
to be scriptural, she reaped where she had not sowed, and gathered where
she had not strawed. If she did not make the man love her,--I believe
she did, as I believe you would, perhaps unconsciously, do,--she used his
love, and was therefore better able to make all other men admire her.