“Right or wrong, what does it matter?” he exclaimed at length, flinging the pencil away.  “The event is the same, in any case.  Does it depend on myself how I act, or what I think?  Do you believe still that we are free agents, and responsible for our acts and thoughts?”

Miriam avoided his look, and said carelessly: 

“I know nothing about it.”

He gave a short laugh.

“Well, that’s better and more honest than saying you believe what is contrary to all human experience.  Look back on your life.  Has its course been of your own shaping?  Compare yourself of to-day with yourself of four years ago; has the change come about by your own agency?  If you are wrong, are you to blame?  Imagine some fanatic seizing you by the arm, and shouting to you to beware of the precipice to which you are advancing—­”

He suited the action to the word, and grasped her wrist.  Miriam shook him off angrily.

“What do you know of me?” she exclaimed, with suppressed scorn.

“True.  Just as little as you know of me, or any one person of any other.  However, I was speaking of what you know of yourself.  I suppose you can look back on one or two things in your life of which your judgment doesn’t approve?  Do you imagine they could have happened otherwise than they did?  Do you think it lay in your own power to take the course you now think the better?”

Miriam stood up impatiently, and showed no intention of replying.  Again Elgar laughed, and waved his arm as if dismissing a subject of thought.

“Come up and look at the drawing-room,” he said, walking to the door.

“Some other time.  I’ll come again in a few days.”

“As you please.  But you must take your chance of finding me at home, unless you give me a couple of days’ notice.”

“Thank you,” she answered coldly.  “I will take my chance.”

He went with her to the front door.  With his hand on the latch, he said in an undertone: 

“Shall you be writing to Cecily?”

“I think not; no.”

“All right.  I’ll let her know you called.”

For Miriam, this interview was confirmative of much that she had suspected.  She believed now that Reuben and his wife, if they had not actually agreed to live apart, were practically in the position of people who have.  The casual reference to a possible abandonment of their house meant more than Reuben admitted.  She did not interpret the situation as any less interested person, with her knowledge of antecedents, certainly would have done; that is to say, conclude that Reuben was expressing his own desires independently of those which Cecily might have formed.  Her probing questions, in which she had seemed to take Cecily’s side, were in reality put with a perverse hope of finding that such a view was untenable, and she came away convinced that this was the case.  The state of things at home considered, Cecily would not have left for so long an absence but on her own wish.