have.  Life is a serious matter.  If you don’t conform to the highest standards you are no one—­it’s a kind of death.  Didn’t this occur to you?  You’ve only to look round you to see the truth of what I am saying.  Did you live without noticing anything, without understanding anything?  From a child you had examples before your eyes—­you could see daily the beauty, the blessings of morality, of principles. . . .”

His voice rose and fell pompously in a strange chant.  His eyes were still, his stare exalted and sullen; his face was set, was hard, was woodenly exulting over the grim inspiration that secretly possessed him, seethed within him, lifted him up into a stealthy frenzy of belief.  Now and then he would stretch out his right arm over her head, as it were, and he spoke down at that sinner from a height, and with a sense of avenging virtue, with a profound and pure joy as though he could from his steep pinnacle see every weighty word strike and hurt like a punishing stone.

“Rigid principles—­adherence to what is right,” he finished after a pause.

“What is right?” she said, distinctly, without uncovering her face.

“Your mind is diseased!” he cried, upright and austere.  “Such a question is rot—­utter rot.  Look round you—­there’s your answer, if you only care to see.  Nothing that outrages the received beliefs can be right.  Your conscience tells you that.  They are the received beliefs because they are the best, the noblest, the only possible.  They survive. . . .”

He could not help noticing with pleasure the philosophic breadth of his view, but he could not pause to enjoy it, for his inspiration, the call of august truth, carried him on.

“You must respect the moral foundations of a society that has made you what you are.  Be true to it.  That’s duty—­that’s honour—­that’s honesty.”

He felt a great glow within him, as though he had swallowed something hot.  He made a step nearer.  She sat up and looked at him with an ardour of expectation that stimulated his sense of the supreme importance of that moment.  And as if forgetting himself he raised his voice very much.

“‘What’s right?’ you ask me.  Think only.  What would you have been if you had gone off with that infernal vagabond? . . .  What would you have been? . . .  You!  My wife! . . .”

He caught sight of himself in the pier glass, drawn up to his full height, and with a face so white that his eyes, at the distance, resembled the black cavities in a skull.  He saw himself as if about to launch imprecations, with arms uplifted above her bowed head.  He was ashamed of that unseemly posture, and put his hands in his pockets hurriedly.  She murmured faintly, as if to herself—­

“Ah!  What am I now?”

“As it happens you are still Mrs. Alvan Hervey—­uncommonly lucky for you, let me tell you,” he said in a conversational tone.  He walked up to the furthest corner of the room, and, turning back, saw her sitting very upright, her hands clasped on her lap, and with a lost, unswerving gaze of her eyes which stared unwinking like the eyes of the blind, at the crude gas flame, blazing and still, between the jaws of the bronze dragon.