"I am too much in earnest to be polite, but it is not your influence that has done harm, it is your money--that fatal gold which has changed the whole aspect of Society within the last thirty years, a change that will continue from bad to worse as long as diamond mines and gold mines are productive, and the inheritors of great names can smile at the vulgarity of millionaires who 'do them well' and will give the open hand of friendship to a host who to-morrow may be branded as a thief What does it matter, if the thief has bought Lord Somebody's estate, and shooting that is among the best in England?" "Well, it is all done with now, as far as I am concerned," Vera said wearily. "I used to go everywhere Claude liked to go. People laughed at us for being inseparable; but I am sick to death of it all, and now he must go to the fine houses alone. No doubt he will be all the more welcome." "Perhaps; but I did not come to talk of trivialities or to echo hackneyed diatribes against a state of things so corrupt and evil that its vices have become the staple of every preacher's discourses, cleric or layman. I want to talk about you and your husband, not about the world you live in. Since you have done with the whirlpool, there is nothing to keep you from better influences. Will you let mine be the hand to lead you along the passive way of light and love, the way that leads to pardon and peace?" Vera turned from him, trying to hide her agitation, but the feelings he had awakened were too strong, and she let her head fall upon the arm of the sofa, and gave herself up to a passion of tears. "Pardon?" she gasped, amidst her sobs; "you know I need pardon?" "We all need pity and pardon. No man's life is spotless, and the life you and Claude have been living is a life of sin--aimless, sensual, godless. I have had a wide experience of men, I have known the best and the worst, and have seen the strange transmutations that may take place in a man, under certain influences--how the sinner may become a saint, and the saint fall into an abyss of sin--but I have never seen changes so sudden and so inexplicable as those I have seen in your husband, whom I have known, and I think I may say I have loved, from the time when he began to have a will and a mind." "I hope you do not blame me for his having left the monastery and come back to the world."