“You ask me to humiliate myself again, Mrs. Manderson. Very well. I will tell you what I thought I should most likely find when I returned to London after my travels: that you had married Marlowe to live abroad.” She heard him with unmoved composure. “We certainly couldn’t have lived very comfortably in England on his money and mine,” she observed thoughtfully. “He had practically nothing then.” He stared at her—“gaped”, she told him some time afterwards. At the moment she laughed with a little embarrassment. “Dear me, Mr. Trent! Have I said anything dreadful? You surely must know.... I thought everybody understood by now.... I’m sure I’ve had to explain it often enough... if I marry again I lose everything that my husband left me.” The effect of this speech upon Trent was curious. For an instant his face was flooded with the emotion of surprise. As this passed away he gradually drew himself together, as he sat, into a tense attitude. He looked, she thought as she saw his knuckles grow white on the arms of the chair, like a man prepared for pain under the hand of the surgeon. But all he said, in a voice lower than his usual tone, was, “I had no idea of it.” “It is so,” she said calmly, trifling with a ring on her finger. “Really, Mr. Trent, it is not such a very unusual thing. I think I am glad of it. For one thing, it has secured me—at least since it became generally known—from a good many attentions of a kind that a woman in my position has to put up with as a rule.” “No doubt,” he said gravely. “And... the other kind?” She looked at him questioningly. “Ah!” she laughed. “The other kind trouble me even less. I have not yet met a man silly enough to want to marry a widow with a selfish disposition, and luxurious habits and tastes, and nothing but the little my father left me.” She shook her head, and something in the gesture shattered the last remnants of Trent’s self-possession. “Haven’t you, by Heaven!” he exclaimed, rising with a violent movement and advancing a step towards her. “Then I am going to show you that human passion is not always stifled by the smell of money. I am going to end the business—my business. I am going to tell you what I dare say scores of better men have wanted to tell you, but couldn’t summon up what I have summoned up—the infernal cheek to do it. They were afraid of making fools of themselves. I am not. You have accustomed me to the feeling this afternoon.” He laughed aloud in his rush of words, and spread out his hands. “Look at me! It is the sight of the century! It is one who says he loves you, and would ask you to give up very great wealth to stand at his side.” She was hiding her face in her hands. He heard her say brokenly, “Please... don’t speak in that way.”