"If I were, the sal volatile yon recommend would be needed, I can tell you. Being a parson you will not understand; being a man, you cannot. Womanly! womanly!--does that imply cant and shams? Am I to mourn with spurious lamentations that selfish profligate, who would have broken my heart had he ever possessed it? To be womanly is to excuse a man's faults, to lie down and be trodden upon, to condone unfaithfulness, and to be grateful for the shreds and patches of an egotistic life. Never! never!" Her lips twisted scornfully, her nostrils dilated, and she clenched her hands to restrain an outburst of that wrath which had consumed her during five years of holy matrimony. Lionel, astonished by her sudden transition from gay to grave, forbore interruption, and she declaimed her marital wrongs in a Boadicean vein. "I have read in that Bible of yours of the casting of pearls before swine. Jim was a Gadarene pig, who would have rent me had I loved him, as I admit a wife should love her husband. My coldness, and what you consider my selfishness, was my sole safeguard against ruin and sorrow and outrage. You know that I speak the truth--I defy you to say otherwise. Jim! oh, Jim," she laughed unpleasantly; "Jim--that rag doll of his family, who is placed on a pedestal and worshipped, as though he were the golden idol he never was and never could be! I respect the Duke much more than I ever respected my husband, for he is genuinely blind to Jim's faults and mourns honestly. But you--you, who knew the man, and rebuked the man--oh, it would be amusing were it not so shameful." Her bosom heaved as she hurled this speech at him, with gibe and jeer and ironic laughter. "I thank God that the man is out of my life," was her passionate cry. "Yes--I thank God." "Did you believe in God you would not say that." "Bah! Theology again." "And truth." "Which is not theology and never will be." "That depends upon belief. The science which treats of God, and of man's duty to God, cannot be understood by you, who have neither hope nor faith." "At least I have charity, the greatest of the three, which you lack." "Give me an example." "I credit you with honesty, while you cry me down as a bad woman." "Pardon me. I do not say that you are bad. Misguided, rather." "And why--according to your lights? Because I do not put up Jim as a pig-idol, to worship with crocodile tears?" She silenced Kaimes for the moment, as there was much truth in her overstated contention. No decent woman could have loved or honoured the dead man; and this outspoken condemnation, provable in the main, was assuredly more honest than pretended laudation and sham sorrow would have been. Yet the merciless indictment jarred on Lionel's sense of propriety, righteous as he knew it to be. "The man is dead," said he, testily; "leave him to God."