“Oh, yes. Now let us go right over and over it again and again; it is only quarter past eleven,” said she, laughing at his eagerness. “You call this a great joke, don’t you?” with passionate intensity. “Perfectly convulsing,” she answered, with a look as if her patience was about gone, and as if, should he dare to browbeat her any longer with that look in his eyes, she would establish her claim to a new line of ability. This possibility was so evident on her countenance that he said: “I believe if you can lie like this, you can do anything.” “I seem to feel some undeveloped ability stirring within me myself,” said she; “nothing of course in the chewing, drinking, sweltering animalism line. But let us say some skillful, intellectual achievement, which might rid the world of a few thousands like yourself, and make room for a new race,” said she with a deliberate consideration that had in it the _savoir-faire_ of a society woman, wrought up beyond much more endurance of the life she had been forced to lead,—a life now coming in sight of the convincing truths of this liberalizing age. Poor Reginald stood actually aghast. His lower jaw had fallen and his eyes protruded, as, with his third finger pointed to his breast, he stammered: “Me! Rid the world of such as me? What have you against me?” She looked at him with fury suppressed; and at last, when she had controlled herself enough to speak, said, in a low tone, full of the sense of insult and degradation which our false social conditions have forced on thinking womanhood: “I have just that against you, which you would have against me, if my character, through and through, was a facsimile of yours. Sir, that is what I have against you!” He looked at her dumb. “I don’t understand, I—” “Oh, well, take the night to it! Think your life over, every step of the way up, since you have entered young hoodlumism; and just fancy that a twin sister of yours had kept with you all the way, step by step, in all your paths—where would she—” Reginald had leaned against the balustrade perfectly white. “You are a very fiend,” he said; and then he pulled up stairs as a man gropes who has been struck by blindness. Mrs. Mancredo was frightened. She wanted to help him up. “You—you’ve done enough,” he said thickly, without looking at her. And she went into her parlor and he went up to the next flight.