"So that I wasn't restraining you with any hope for my own advantage," he went on. "There was the kid, and there was you. I wanted to put a brake on you, to make you go slow. You're a complex individual, Stella. Along with certain fixed, fundamental principles, you've got a streak of divine madness in you, a capacity for reckless undertakings. You'd never have married me if you hadn't. I trusted you absolutely. But, I was afraid in spite of my faith. You had draped such an idealistic mantle around Monohan. I wanted to rend that before it came to a final separation between us. It worked out, because he couldn't resist trying to take a crack at me when the notion seized him. "So," he continued, after a pause, "you aren't responsible, and I've never considered you responsible for any of this. It's between him and me, and it's been shaping for years. Whenever our trails crossed there was bound to be a clash. There's always been a natural personal antagonism between us. It began to show when we were kids, you might say. Monohan's nature is such that he can't acknowledge defeat, he can't deny himself a gratification. He's a supreme egotist. He's always had plenty of money, he's always had whatever he wanted, and it never mattered to him how he gratified his desires. "The first time we locked horns was in my last year at high school. Monohan was a star athlete. I beat him in a pole vault. That irked him so that he sulked and sneered, and generally made himself so insulting that I slapped him. We fought, and I whipped him. I had a temper that I hadn't learned to keep in hand those days, and I nearly killed him. I had nothing but contempt for him, anyway, because even then, when he wasn't quite twenty, he was a woman hunter, preying on silly girls. I don't know what his magic with women is, but it works, until they find him out. He was playing off two or three fool girls that I knew and at the same time keeping a woman in apartments down-town,--a girl he'd picked up on a trip to Georgia,--like any confirmed rounder.