rset would marry you tomorrow,
if you'd tell him all you know, and give him the chance to show the lady
the door. I daresay he would; but you don't seem to care for that
particular form of getting even, and, taking a purely business view of
the question, I think you're right. In a deal like that, nobody comes out
with perfectly clean hands, and the only way for you to start fresh is to
get Bertha Dorset to back you up, instead of trying to fight her."

He paused long enough to draw breath, but not to give her time for the
expression of her gathering resistance; and as he pressed on, expounding
and elucidating his idea with the directness of the man who has no doubts
of his cause, she found the indignation gradually freezing on her lip,
found herself held fast in the grasp of his argument by the mere cold
strength of its presentation. There was no time now to wonder how he had
heard of her obtaining the letters: all her world was dark outside the
monstrous glare of his scheme for using them. And it was not, after the
first moment, the horror of the idea that held her spell-bound, subdued
to his will; it was rather its subtle affinity to her own inmost
cravings. He would marry her tomorrow if she could regain Bertha Dorset's
friendship; and to induce the open resumption of that friendship, and the
tacit retractation of all that had caused its withdrawal, she had only to
put to the lady the latent menace contained in the packet so miraculously
delivered into her hands. Lily saw in a flash the advantage of this
course over that which poor Dorset had pressed upon her. The other plan
depended for its success on the infliction of an open injury, while this
reduced the transaction to a private understanding, of which no third
person need have the remotest hint. Put by Rosedale in terms of
business-like give-and-take, this understanding took on the harmless air
of a mutual accommodation, like a transfer of property or a revision of
boundary lines. It certainly simplified life to view it as a perpetual
adjustment, a play of party politics, in which every concession had its
recognized equivalent: Lily's tired mind was fascinated by this escape
from fluctuating ethical estimates into a region of concrete weights and
measures.

Rosedale, as she listened, seemed to read in her silence not only a
gradual acquiescence in his plan, but a dangerously far-reaching
perception of the chances it offered; for as she continued to stand
before