'Do I deserve that you should say that to me? I never pretended to be anything but indifferent to those I didn't love. I should have been more hypocritical. You despise me now, so I pay the penalty of my own candour. I have not the pleasant graces of a Fru Thyregod, Julian; not towards you, that is. I wouldn't offer you the insult of an easy philandering. I might make your life a burden; I might even kill you. I know I have often been impossible towards you in the past. I should probably be still more impossible in the future. If I loved you less, I should, no doubt, love you better. You see that I am candid.' He was struck, and reflected: she spoke truly, there was indeed a vein of candour which contradicted and redeemed the petty deceits and untruthfulnesses which so exasperated and offended him. But he would not admit his hesitation. 'I have told you a hundred times that you are cruel and vain and irredeemably worthless.' She answered after a pause, in the deep and wonderful voice which she knew so well how to use,-- 'You are more cruel than I; you hurt me more than I can say.' He resisted his impulse to renounce his words, to pretend that he had chosen them in deliberate malice. As he said nothing, she added,-- 'Besides, have I ever shown myself any of those things to you? I haven't been cruel to you; I haven't even been selfish; you have no right to find fault with me.' She had blundered; he flew into a rage. 'Your damned feminine reasoning! Your damned personal point of view! I can see well enough the fashion in which you treat other men. I don't judge you only by your attitude towards myself.' Off her guard, she was really incapable of grasping his argument; she tried to insist, to justify herself, but before his storm of anger she cowered away. 'Julian, how you frighten me.' 'You only pretend to be frightened.' 'You are brutal; you mangle every word I say,' she said hopelessly. He had reduced her to silence; he stood over her threateningly, much as a tamer of wild beasts who waits for the next spring of the panther. Desperate, her spirit flamed up again, and she cried,-- 'You treat me monstrously; I am a fool to waste my time over you; I am accustomed to quite different treatment.' 'You are spoilt; you are accustomed to flattery--flattery which means less than nothing,' he sneered, stamping upon her attempt at arrogance.