'What does she mean then? Has she no regard for her own character?'
'I would explain it to you all, Carbury, if I could. But you would never have the patience to hear me.'
'I am not naturally impatient.'
'But this would drive you mad. I wrote to her assuring her that it must be all over. Then she came here and sent for me. Was I not bound to go to her?'
'Yes;--to go to her and repeat what you had said in your letter.'
'I did do so. I went with that very purpose, and did repeat it.'
'Then you should have left her.'
'Ah; but you do not understand. She begged that I would not desert her in her loneliness. We have been so much together that I could not desert her.'
'I certainly do not understand that, Paul. You have allowed yourself to be entrapped into a promise of marriage; and then, for reasons which we will not go into now but which we both thought to be adequate, you resolved to break your promise, thinking that you would be justified in doing so. But nothing can justify you in living with the lady afterwards on such terms as to induce her to suppose that your old promise holds good.'
'She does not think so. She cannot think so.'
'Then what must she be, to be here with you? And what must you be, to be here, in public, with such a one as she is? I don't know why I should trouble you or myself about it. People live now in a way that I don't comprehend. If this be your way of living, I have no right to complain.'
'For God's sake, Carbury, do not speak in that way. It sounds as though you meant to throw me over.'
'I should have said that you had thrown me over. You come down here to this hotel, where we are both known, with this lady whom you are not going to marry;--and I meet you, just by chance. Had I known it, of course I could have turned the other way. But coming on you by accident, as I did, how am I not to speak to you? And if I speak, what am I to say? Of course I think that the lady will succeed in marrying you.'
'Never.'
'And that such a marriage will be your destruction. Doubtless she is good-looking.'
'Yes, and clever. And you must remember that the manners of her country are not as the manners of this country.'