"That’s the way _you_ look at it!" she cried, indignantly. "You think I hopelessly compromised myself by what I did, and that I’ll have to tie myself to you for life in consequence; but I won’t. I’d rather die. I couldn’t live with you. I hate you! I detest you! I hate and detest you because you’ve made me detest myself. To think that I have to stand here listening to a proposal in—in the humiliating way you make it." "Look here, Virginia, you are going too far!" he cried, white with the dawning realization of defeat and quivering in every limb. "You are no fool, if you _are_ only a girl, and you know that a man in—well, in my position, will not take a thing like this calmly. I’ve been desperate, and I hardly knew what I was about, but this—I can’t stand this, Virginia." "Well, I couldn’t marry you," she answered. "If you were a king and I a poor beggar, I wouldn’t agree to be your wife. I’d never marry a man I did not thoroughly respect, and I don’t respect you a bit. In fact, knowing you has only shown me how fine and noble, by contrast, other men are. Since this thing happened, one man—" She suddenly paused. Her impulse had led her too far. He glared at her for an instant, and then suddenly grasped her hand and held it in such a tight, brutal clasp that she writhed in pain, but he held onto it, twisting it in his unconscious fury. "I know who you mean," he said. "I see it all now. You have seen Luke King, and he has been saying sweet things to you. Ann Boyd is his friend, too, and she hates me. But look here, if you think I will stand having a man of that stamp defeat me, you don’t know me. You don’t know the lengths a Chester will go to gain a point. I see it all. You’ve been different of late. You used to like him, and he has been talking to you since he got back. It will certainly be a dark day for him when he dares to step between me and my plans." "You are going entirely too fast," Virginia said, grown suddenly cautious. "There’s nothing, absolutely nothing, between Luke King and myself, and, moreover, there never will be." "You may tell that to a bigger fool than I am," Chester fumed. "I know there is something between you two, and, frankly, trouble is brewing for him. He may write his long-winded sermons about loving mankind, and bask in the praise of the sentimental idiots who dote on him, but I’ll draw him back to practical things. I’ll bring him down to the good, old-fashioned way of settling matters between men." "Well, it’s cowardly of you to keep me here by brute force," Virginia said, finally wresting her hand from his clasp and beginning to walk onward. "I’ve said there is nothing between him and me, and I shall not repeat it. If you want to raise a fuss over it, you will only make yourself ridiculous."