You had been meeting her gaze across the table as she spoke, but now you dropped your lids, hiding your eyes behind their long lashes; and nothing but the color receding from your cheeks, leaving them as white as your throat and brow, told of what you felt. “Oh, say something,” appealed Agnes to me in a whisper. “Anything to divert the”— “And I really think,” went on Mrs. Polhemus, smiling sweetly, with her eyes on you, “that if you were as thoroughly honest with us as, a moment ago, you were insistent on the world’s being, you would confess to a _tendresse_ still felt for that particular form of obliquity.” I shall recall the moment which followed that speech if it shall ever fall to me to sit in the jury-box and pass judgment on a murderer, for I know that had I been armed, and my mother a man, I should have killed her; and it taught me that murder is in every man’s heart. Yet I was not out of my head, but was curiously clear-minded. Though allusion to my shame had hitherto always made me dumb, I was able to speak now without the slightest difficulty; I imagine because the thought of your pain made me forget my own. “Which is better, Mrs. Polhemus,” I asked, with a calmness I marveled at afterwards, “to love dishonesty or to dishonestly love?” “Is this a riddle?” she said, though not removing her eyes from you. “I suppose, since right and wrong are evolutionary,” I rejoined, “that every ethical question is more or less of a conundrum. But the thought in my mind was that there is only nobility in a love so great that it can outlast even wrongdoing.” Then, in my controlled passion, I stabbed her as deeply as I could make words stab. “Compare such a love, for instance, with another of which I have heard,—that of a woman who so valued the world’s opinion that she would not get a divorce from an embezzling husband, because of the social stigma it involved, yet who remarried within a week of hearing of her first husband’s death, because she thought that fact could not be known. Which love is the higher?” The color blazed up in my mother’s cheeks, as she turned from you to look at me, with eyes that would have killed if they could; and it was her manner, far more than even the implication of my words, which told the rest of the table that my nominally impersonal case was truly a thrust of the knife. A moment’s appalling pause followed, and then, though the fruit was being passed, the hostess broke the terrible spell by rising, as if the time had come for the ladies to withdraw. When, later, the men followed them, Agnes intercepted me at the door, and whispered, “Oh, doctor, it was magnificent! I was so afraid Maizie would break down if—I never dreamed you could do it so splendidly. You’re almost as much of a love as papa! It will teach the cat to let Maizie alone! Now, do you want to be extra good?” “So long as you don’t want any more vitriol-throwing,” I assented, smiling. “Remember that a hostess deserves some consideration.”