“I agree with you,” said Atherton, playing with his spoon. “You know how I hate anything that sins against order, and this whole thing is disorderly. It's intolerable, as you say. But we must bear our share of it. We're all bound together. No one sins or suffers to himself in a civilized state,--or religious state; it's the same thing. Every link in the chain feels the effect of the violence, more or less intimately. We rise or fall together in Christian society. It's strange that it should be so hard to realize a thing that every experience of life teaches. We keep on thinking of offences against the common good as if they were abstractions!” “Well, _one_ thing,” said Clara, “I shall always think unnecessarily shocking and disgraceful about it. And that is Ben's going out with her on this journey. I don't see how you could allow that, Eustace.” “Yes,” said Atherton, after a thoughtful silence, “it _is_ shocking. The only consolation is that it is _not_ unnecessarily shocking. I'm afraid that it's necessarily so. When any disease of soul or body has gone far enough, it makes its own conditions, and other things must adjust themselves to it. Besides, no one knows the ugliness of the situation but Halleck himself. I don't see how I could have interfered; and upon the whole I don't know that I ought to have interfered, if I could. She would be helpless without him; and he can get no harm from it. In fact, it's part of his expiation, which must have begun as soon as he met her again after he came home.” Clara was convinced, but not reconciled. She only said, “I don't like it.” Her husband did not reply; he continued musingly: “When the old man made that final appeal to her jealousy,--all that there is really left, probably, of her love for her husband,--and she responded with a face as wicked as his, I couldn't help looking at Halleck--” “Oh, poor Ben! _How_ did he take it? It must have scared, it must have disgusted him!” “That's what I had expected. But there was nothing in his face but pity. He understood, and he pitied her. That was all.” Clara rose, and turned to the window, where she remained looking through her tears at the gulls on the shallow. It seemed much more than twenty-four hours since she had taken leave of Marcia and the rest at the station, and saw them set out on their long journey with its uncertain and unimaginable end. She had deeply sympathized with them all, but at the same time she had felt very keenly the potential scandalousness of the situation; she shuddered inwardly when she thought what if people knew; she had always revolted from contact with such social facts as their errand involved. She got Olive aside for a moment, and asked her, “Don't you _hate_ it, Olive? Did you ever dream of being mixed up in such a thing? I should die,--simply _die_!” “I shall not think of dying, unless we fail,” answered Olive. “And, as for hating it, I haven't consulted my feelings a great deal; but I rather think I like it.”