“I have studied you,” he said, in a voice of one coming to the end of an oration. “I have found you in all ways capable of filling the position of my wife. Er--you would be a credit to me. Yes, indeed. End all your difficulties. Satisfy every whim. What more can anybody ask?” He stared at her pompously, but with a horrid hunger in his eyes, stared as if waiting for an answer. “I am asking you,” he said, “to become Mrs. Abner Fownes.” She gasped to hear the unthinkable put into words. It had not seemed possible to her that it could be put into words. It was the sort of thing one hinted at, made use of _double entendre_ to convey. But he dragged it out into the light and gloated over it. He insisted on stating it baldly.... She bore it as she would endure some shock, quivered under the affront of it, caught her breath, grasped at her heart as if to quiet it with her fingers. For moments she could not move nor speak. She was engulfed in material horror of the thing. It was as if she were immersed in some cold, clammy, clinging, _living_ fluid--a fluid endowed with gristly life. Suddenly she found herself upon her feet, speaking words. The words came from subconscious depths, not directed by intellect or by will, but by the deep-lying soul, by the living, indestructible thing which was herself. Disgust emanated from her. “You toad!” she heard herself say. “You white, dreadful toad! You dare to say such words to _me_! You dare to sit there appraising me, coveting me! You ask me to be your wife--your _wife_!... You are unspeakably horrible--can’t you see how horrible you are?” She heard her voice arguing with him, trying to impress him with his own horribleness. “You dreadful, fat little creature! A credit to you!... I can think of no woman so low, so degraded, so unnatural as to be a credit to what you are. A woman of the streets would refuse you. Your touch would be death to her soul--to what fragment of soul she retained.... How dare you insult me so?...” The words would not stop, the dreadful words. She did not wish to utter them, knew their utterance served no purpose, but they continued to flow as water from a broken spout. She rent and tore him, holding him up to the light of the stars for himself to see. It was a dreadful thing to do to any human being; to sink one’s claws into his body, searching for and finding and rending the soul.