“So you ought to be. You was always playing at being a martyr, and now you damned well can be one. And I hope you are. The trouble with you was that I spoiled you and fooled you to the top of your bent, and let you bully-rag me, and never turned round and gave you a bit of the naked truth yourself.” “I know it,” she said. “You were a great deal too fond of me for my good, Ned, and if you hadn’t loved me so well, I dare say you’d have been a better husband.” “I couldn’t have been a better husband,” he answered, “and if you’d been made of decent stuff, you’d have known it. Not that I didn’t see the ugly truth about you—I did; but I hoped and hoped that with time you’d get more sense, and so I held my tongue and held on.” “How I wish you’d told me my faults, Ned.” “You oughtn’t to want telling. If you’d got any conscience, which you never had, you’d have seen your faults and suffered from ’em, as you ought. For one thing, you were greedy as the grave, and that envious that you didn’t like anybody else to have anything you lacked. If you saw a worm on the ground, you wished you was a bird. ’Twas always so. Everybody else was better off than you, and had got nicer cats and gardens and husbands and everything. A filthy jealousy it was that made you miserable, when you ought to have been happy, and tempted you off to try your luck with this thing, that’s only a machine, not a man. Some chaps would have took you two and smashed your heads together like egg-shells, as you deserved; but I’m above anything like that. You thought I was a fool; but I wasn’t such a fool as to do that. You wrecked me, but I wasn’t going to wreck you.” “I’ve wrecked myself, more likely,” said Medora. “I don’t know nothing about that. Whatever you get won’t be half what you deserve.” Ned appeared to have changed for the better in Medora’s eyes. The harsher were his words, the better she liked them. Here was real martyrdom. The emotion of this suffering became a luxury. She wept, but was not in the least unhappy. “I’ve ruined two very fine men—that’s what I’ve done,” said Medora. She flung down her kingcups and bluebells, and sat on a stone and covered her face with her pocket-handkerchief. He looked at her fiercely, and rated her from a savage heart. “Crocodile tears! You never even cried like a decent woman, from your heart, because you haven’t got a heart.” “Don’t say that,” she said. “Your heart can’t break if you haven’t got one, and mine’s broken all right now. With all my dreadful faults, I’m human—only too much so. I know what I’ve done, and what I’ve lost.” “And what you’ve won, too—a lunatic, that will very likely end on the gallows as a traitor to the country, or some such thing.” “No, he won’t,” she replied. “He’s too dull for that.” “You can call him dull, can you?” “You’ve no right to make me talk about him,” answered she; “all the same, honesty’s no crime, and I say he’s a dull man, because anybody with only one idea is dull.”