Mrs. Wortle, good
and kind as you are; but it is not because I do not think myself fit. It
is because I will not injure you in the estimation of those who do not
know what is fit and what is unfit. I am not ashamed of myself. I owe it
to him to blush for nothing that he has caused me to do. I have but two
judges,--the Lord in heaven, and he, my husband, upon earth."

"Nobody has condemned you here."

"Yes;--they have condemned me. But I am not angry at that. You do not
think, Mrs. Wortle, that I can be angry with you,--so kind as you have
been, so generous, so forgiving;--the more kind because you think that we
are determined, headstrong sinners? Oh no! It is natural that you should
think so,--but I think differently. Circumstances have so placed me that
they have made me unfit for your society. If I had no decent gown to
wear, or shoes to my feet, I should be unfit also;--but not on that
account disgraced in my own estimation. I comfort myself by thinking that
I cannot be altogether bad when a man such as he has loved me and does
love me."

The two women, when they parted on that morning, kissed each other, which
they had not done before; and Mrs. Wortle had been made to doubt whether,
after all, the sin had been so very sinful. She did endeavour to ask
herself whether she would not have done the same in the same
circumstances. The woman, she thought, must have been right to have
married the man whom she loved, when she heard that that first horrid
husband was dead. There could, at any rate, have been no sin in that.
And then, what ought she to have done when the dead man,--dead as he was
supposed to have been,--burst into her room? Mrs. Wortle,--who found it
indeed extremely difficult to imagine herself to be in such a
position,--did at last acknowledge that, in such circumstances, she
certainly would have done whatever Dr. Wortle had told her. She could not
bring it nearer to herself than that. She could not suggest to herself
two men as her own husbands. She could not imagine that the Doctor had
been either the bad husband, who had unexpectedly come to life,--or the
good husband, who would not, in truth, be her husband at all; but she did
determine, in her own mind, that, however all that might have been, she
would clearly have done whatever the Doctor told her. She would have
sworn to obey him, even though, when swearing, she should not have really
married him. It was terrible to think of,--so