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By Root 5788 0

to my private affairs. For this is partly my affair, you see—at least, it depends on you to make it so. Let’s look the situation straight in the eye. Mrs. Dorset, for reasons we needn’t go into, did you a beastly bad turn last spring. Everybody knows what Mrs. Dorset is, and her best friends wouldn’t believe her on oath where their own interests were concerned; but as long as they’re out of the row it’s much easier to follow her lead than to set themselves against it, and you’ve simply been sacrificed to their laziness and selfishness. Isn’t that a pretty fair statement of the case?—Well, some people say you’ve got the neatest kind of an answer in your hands: that George Dorset would marry you tomorrow, if you’d tell him all you know, and give him the chance to show the lady the door. I daresay he would; but you don’t seem to care for that particular form of getting even, and, taking a purely business view of the question, I think you’re right. In a deal like that, nobody comes out with perfectly clean hands, and the only way for you to start fresh is to get Bertha Dorset to back you up, instead of trying to fight her.”

He paused long enough to draw breath, but not to give her time for the expression of her gathering resistance; and as he pressed on, expounding and elucidating his idea with the directness of the man who has no doubts of his cause, she found the indignation gradually freezing on her lip, found herself held fast in the grasp of his argument by the mere cold strength of its presentation. There was no time now to wonder how he had heard of her obtaining the letters: all her world was dark outside the monstrous glare of his scheme for using them. And it was not, after the first moment, the horror of the idea that held her spell-bound, subdued to his will; it was rather its subtle affinity to her own inmost cravings. He would marry her tomorrow if she could regain Bertha Dorset’s friendship; and to induce the open resumption of that friendship, and the tacit retractation of all that had caused its withdrawal, she had only to put to the lady the latent menace contained in the packet so miraculously delivered into her hands. Lily saw in a flash the advantage of this course over that which poor Dorset had pressed upon her. The other plan depended for its success on the infliction of an open injury, while this reduced the transaction to a private understanding, of which no third person need have the remotest hint. Put by Rosedale in terms of business-like give-and-take, this understanding took on the harmless air of a mutual accommodation, like a transfer of property or a revision of boundary lines. It certainly simplified life to view it as a perpetual adjustment, a play of party politics, in which every concession had its recognized equivalent: Lily’s mind was fascinated by this escape from fluctuating ethical into a region of concrete weights and measures.

Rosedale, as she listened, seemed to read in her silence not only a gradual acquiescence in his plan, but a dangerously far-reaching perception of the chances it offered; for as she continued to stand before him without speaking, he broke out, with a quick return upon himself: “You see how simple it is, don’t you? Well, don’t be carried away by the idea that it’s too simple. It isn’t exactly as if you’d started in with a clean bill of health. Now we’re talking let’s call things by their right names, and clear the whole business up. You know well enough that Bertha Dorset couldn’t have touched you if there hadn’t been—well—questions asked before—little points of interrogation, eh? Bound to happen to a good-looking girl with stingy relatives, I suppose; anyhow, they did happen, and she found the ground prepared for her. Do you see where I’m coming out? You don’t want these little questions cropping up again. It’s one thing to get Bertha Dorset into line—but what you want is to keep her there. You can frighten her fast enough—but how are you going to keep her frightened? By showing her that you’re as powerful as she is. All the letters in the world won’t do that