"You never understood me," she said, impatiently. "You might have guessed that I had, from youth upwards, lived in the fever of passion inspired or felt; you might have known that I should master or be mastered. I warned you that though I could promise nothing, I should exact much, and you defied me to exact too much. Yet when it came to the test--what did you give me? a feeling weak as water, cold as ice! Why, you would not so much as have given up what you call Art for my sake!" "Nor for that of mortal woman," indignantly replied Cornelius. "Give up painting! Do you forget I told you I would love you as a man should love?" "That is, I suppose, a little more than Daisy, and something less than your pictures. I have been accustomed to other love." Cornelius reddened. "An unworthy passion," he said, "stops at nothing to secure its gratification; a noble one is bound by honour." "I leave you to such passions," calmly answered Miriam; "to painting, which you love so much; to the domestic affections in which you weakly thought to include me. I have tried to make you feel what I call passion, I have failed; it is well that we should part; let us do so quietly, and without recrimination." Cornelius looked at her like one confounded. She spoke composedly, as if she neither cared for nor felt that, on her own confession, she was guilty. Of excuse or justification she evidently thought not. "You think of Daisy," she continued; "think of my conduct to her what you choose. I will only say this, though she, poor child, has hated me, as she loved you, with her whole heart, you have been, are still, and will remain, her greatest enemy." "I!" indignantly exclaimed Cornelius. "Yes: and you must be blind not to see that, by seeking to sever from you a child whom a few years will make a woman, I was her best friend; and so she will know some day, when you break her heart, and tell her you never meant it." "May God forsake me when I place not her happiness before mine!" replied Cornelius, in a low tone, and giving me a troubled look. "You are generous," answered Miriam, with an ironical, but not unmusical laugh, and looking at me over her shoulder with all the scorn of conscious beauty; "you think so now; but I know, and have always known, better. And yet, spite of that knowledge, and though with foolish insolence she ever placed herself in my way, I have felt sorry for her at times. Of course you will not believe this: with the exaggeration of your character, you will at once set me down as one delighting in evil; whereas what you call evil is to me only a different form of good, justifiable according to the end in view. If I had succeeded in inspiring you with an exclusive, all-engrossing passion--even though the cost had been a few pictures less, and the loss of Daisy's heart--know that I would have conferred on you the greatest blessing one human being can bestow on another."