"Your mother orders you home, and rather than offend her, or meet her sarcasms, you ask Theodora to do what you well know she will never do. Having taught her to love you again, you make her an offer that it is impossible for her to accept; then you leave her to suffer once more the pang of wrong and despairing love. Cowardly is too mild a word; your conduct is that of a scoundrel." "My God, David, are you turning against me?" "Robert, Robert! I am ashamed of you. Suppose Theodora went back to Glasgow with you, what would be her position, and what would people--especially women--say about it? She would be a wife who ran away from her husband, but whom her husband discovered, and brought back to her duties. Upon this text, what cutting, cruel speeches mother and all the women in your set would make. The position would be a triumph for you--some men would envy and admire you, all would praise you for standing up so persistently for the authority of the male. But poor Theodora, who would stand by her?" "I would." "And your defence of your wife would be counted as a thing chivalrous and magnanimous in you, but it would be disgraceful in her to require it. She, the poor innocent one, would get all the blame and the shame, you, the guilty one----" "Stop, David! I never thought of her return in this light." "I can imagine mother and the rest of the women chortling and glorying over the runaway wife brought back." "I tell you, I would stand by her through thick and thin." "But you could not prevent the women hounding her, and upon my honor, Robert, she would deserve it." "No, David. She would not deserve it." "I say she would." "What for?" "For coming back with you. Every woman with a particle of self-respect would feel that she had betrayed her sex, and dishonored her wifehood, and they would despise, and speak ill of her for doing so. And she would deserve it." "Then all this month you have been expecting me to come here to live?" "There was no other manly and gentlemanly way out of your dilemma; and your coming at all authorized the expectation." "The iron works are not all, David. Do you think I care nothing for my family, and my country?" "Do you think you are the only person who cares for their family? What about Theodora's feelings? Her father gave up his ministry, and taking his wife and the savings of his whole life, he came here to the ends of the earth with his child, because you had treated her and her son cruelly. Now you ask her to leave them here, in a new country, where they have not one relative--in their old age----" "I forgot their claim. I will pay all their expenses back to England."