“You’ve heard it?”

“Yes—­from myself.  I felt as you do, I argued as you do, I acted as I mean to prevent your doing, when I married Alan’s father.”

The long empty gallery seemed to reverberate with the girl’s startled exclamation—­“Oh, Mrs. Quentin—­”

“Hush; let me speak.  Do you suppose I’d do this if you were the kind of pink-and-white idiot he ought to have married?  It’s because I see you’re alive, as I was, tingling with beliefs, ambitions, energies, as I was—­that I can’t see you walled up alive, as I was, without stretching out a hand to save you!” She sat gazing rigidly forward, her eyes on the pictures, speaking in the low precipitate tone of one who tries to press the meaning of a lifetime into a few breathless sentences.

“When I met Alan’s father,” she went on, “I knew nothing of his—­his work.  We met abroad, where I had been living with my mother.  That was twenty-six years ago, when the Radiator was less—­less notorious than it is now.  I knew my husband owned a newspaper—­a great newspaper—­and nothing more.  I had never seen a copy of the Radiator; I had no notion what it stood for, in politics—­or in other ways.  We were married in Europe, and a few months afterward we came to live here.  People were already beginning to talk about the Radiator.  My husband, on leaving college, had bought it with some money an old uncle had left him, and the public at first was merely curious to see what an ambitious, stirring young man without any experience of journalism was going to make out of his experiment.  They found first of all that he was going to make a great deal of money out of it.  I found that out too.  I was so happy in other ways that it didn’t make much difference at first; though it was pleasant to be able to help my mother, to be generous and charitable, to live in a nice house, and wear the handsome gowns he liked to see me in.  But still it didn’t really count—­it counted so little that when, one day, I learned what the Radiator was, I would have gone out into the streets barefooted rather than live another hour on the money it brought in....”  Her voice sank, and she paused to steady it.  The girl at her side did not speak or move.  “I shall never forget that day,” she began again.  “The paper had stripped bare some family scandal—­some miserable bleeding secret that a dozen unhappy people had been struggling to keep out of print—­that would have been kept out if my husband had not—­Oh, you must guess the rest!  I can’t go on!”

She felt a hand on hers.  “You mustn’t go on, Mrs. Quentin,” the girl whispered.

“Yes, I must—­I must!  You must be made to understand.”  She drew a deep breath.  “My husband was not like Alan.  When he found out how I felt about it he was surprised at first—­but gradually he began to see—­or at least I fancied he saw—­the hatefulness of it.  At any rate he saw how I suffered, and he offered to give up the whole thing—­to