"Have I denied that the portrait you saw is indeed the portrait of Alexander Minchin?
And yet how easy that would have been! It was taken long before you knew him; he must have altered considerably after that.

Or I might have known him under another name.
But no, I tell you honestly that your first husband was a very dear friend of mine, more years ago than I care to reckon.

Did you hear me ?" he added, with one of his sudden changes of tone and manner.

"A very dear friend, I said, for that he undoubtedly was; but was I going to ask you to marry a very dear friend of the man who deteriorated so terribly, and who treated you so ill ?" Delivered in the most natural manner imaginable, with the quiet confidence of which this man was full, and followed by a smile of conscious yet not unkindly triumph, this argument, like most that fell from his lips upon her ears, was invested with a value out of all proportion to its real worth; and Steel clinched it with one of those homely saws which are not disdained by makers of speeches the wide world over.
"Could you really think," he added, with one of his rarest and most winning smiles, "that I should be such a fool as to invite you to step out of the frying-pan into the fire ?" Rachel felt for a moment that she would like to say it was exactly what she had done; but even in that moment she perceived that such a statement would have been very far from the truth.

And her nature was large enough to refrain from the momentary gratification of a bitter repartee.