There was something in the ring of Roderick’s voice, as he uttered these words, which sent them home with convincing force.  He was not talking for effect, or the mere sensuous pleasure of extravagant and paradoxical utterance, as had often enough been the case ere this; he was not even talking viciously or ill-humoredly.  He was talking passionately, desperately, and from an irresistible need to throw off the oppressive burden of his mother’s confidence.  His cruel eloquence brought the poor lady to her feet, and she stood there with clasped hands, petrified and voiceless.  Mary Garland quickly left her place, came straight to Roderick, and laid her hand on his arm, looking at him with all her tormented heart in her eyes.  He made no movement to disengage himself; he simply shook his head several times, in dogged negation of her healing powers.  Rowland had been living for the past month in such intolerable expectancy of disaster that now that the ice was broken, and the fatal plunge taken, his foremost feeling was almost elation; but in a moment his orderly instincts and his natural love of superficial smoothness overtook it.

“I really don’t see, Roderick,” he said, “the profit of your talking in just this way at just this time.  Don’t you see how you are making your mother suffer?”

“Do I enjoy it myself?” cried Roderick.  “Is the suffering all on your side and theirs?  Do I look as if I were happy, and were stirring you up with a stick for my amusement?  Here we all are in the same boat; we might as well understand each other!  These women must know that I ’m not to be counted on.  That sounds remarkably cool, no doubt, and I certainly don’t deny your right to be utterly disgusted with me.”

“Will you keep what you have got to say till another time,” said Mary, “and let me hear it alone?”

“Oh, I ’ll let you hear it as often as you please; but what ’s the use of keeping it?  I ’m in the humor; it won’t keep!  It ’s a very simple matter.  I ’m a failure, that ’s all; I ’m not a first-rate man.  I ’m second-rate, tenth-rate, anything you please.  After that, it ’s all one!”

Mary Garland turned away and buried her face in her hands; but Roderick, struck, apparently, in some unwonted fashion with her gesture, drew her towards him again, and went on in a somewhat different tone.  “It ’s hardly worth while we should have any private talk about this, Mary,” he said.  “The thing would be comfortable for neither of us.  It ’s better, after all, that it be said once for all and dismissed.  There are things I can’t talk to you about.  Can I, at least?  You are such a queer creature!”

“I can imagine nothing you should n’t talk to me about,” said Mary.

“You are not afraid?” he demanded, sharply, looking at her.

She turned away abruptly, with lowered eyes, hesitating a moment.  “Anything you think I should hear, I will hear,” she said.  And then she returned to her place at the window and took up her work.