“It is all your lying religion!” she said.

“Your behavior, Juliet,” answered Dorothy, putting on the matron, and speaking with authority, “shows plainly how right I was.  You were not to be trusted, and I knew it.  Had I told you, you would have rushed to him, and been anything but welcome.  He would not even have known you; and you would have been two on the doctor’s hands.  You would have made everything public, and when your husband came to himself, would probably have been the death of him after all.”

“He may have begun to think more kindly of me by that time,” said Juliet, humbled a little.

“We must not act on may-haves,” answered Dorothy.

“You say he looks wretched now,” suggested Juliet.

“And well he may, after concussion of the brain, not to mention what preceded it,” said Dorothy.

She had come to see that Juliet required very plain speaking.  She had so long practiced the art of deceiving herself that she was skillful at it.  Indeed, but for the fault she had committed, she would all her life long have been given to petting and pitying, justifying and approving of herself.  One can not help sometimes feeling that the only chance for certain persons is to commit some fault sufficient to shame them out of the self-satisfaction in which they burrow.  A fault, if only it be great and plain enough to exceed their powers of self-justification, may then be, of God’s mercy, not indeed an angel of light to draw them, but verily a goblin of darkness to terrify them out of themselves.  For the powers of darkness are His servants also, though incapable of knowing it:  He who is first and last can, even of those that love the lie, make slaves of the truth.  And they who will not be sons shall be slaves, let them rant and wear crowns as they please in the slaves’ quarters.

“You must not expect him to get over such a shock all at once,” said Dorothy. “—­It may be,” she continued, “that you were wrong in running away from him.  I do not pretend to judge between you, but, perhaps, after the injury you had done him, you ought to have left it with him to say what you were to do next.  By taking it in your own hands, you may have only added to the wrong.”

“And who helped me?” returned Juliet, in a tone of deep reproach.

“Helped you to run from him, Juliet!—­Really, if you were in the habit of behaving to your husband as you do to me—!” She checked herself, and resumed calmly—­“You forget the facts of the case, my dear.  So far from helping you to run from him, I stopped you from running so far that neither could he find you, nor you return to him again.  But now we must make the best of it by waiting.  We must find out whether he wants you again, or your absence is a relief to him.  If I had been a man, I should have been just as wild as he.”

She had seen in Juliet some signs that self-abhorrence was wanting, and self-pity reviving, and she would connive at no unreality in her treatment of herself.  She was one thing when bowed to the earth in misery and shame, and quite another if thinking herself hardly used on all sides.