"QX. I haven't ever mentioned the worst thing. I didn't want to--but if you've got to have it, here it is," the man wrenched out. "Look at what I am. A barroom brawler. A rum-dum. A hard-boiled egg. A cold-blooded, ruthless murderer, even of my own men--" "Not that, Kim, ever, and you know it," she rebuked him. "What else can you call it?" he grated. "A killer besides; a red-handed butcher if there ever was one--then, now, and forever. I've got to be. I can't get away from it. Do you think that you, or any other decent woman, could stand it to live with me? That you could feel my arms around you, feel my gory paws touching you, without going sick at the stomach?" "Oh, so _that's_ what's really been griping you all this time!" Clarrissa was surprised and entirely unshaken. "I don't have to think about that, Kim--I know. If you were a murderer or had the killer instinct, that would be different, but you aren't and you haven't. You are hard, of course. You have to be--but do you think that I would ever run a temperature over a softy? You brawl, yes--like the world's champion you are. Anybody you ever killed needed killing, there's no question of that. You don't do those things for fun; and the fact that you can drive yourself to do the things that have to be done shows your true caliber. "Nor have you ever thought of the obverse; that you lean over backward in wielding that terrific power of yours. The Desplaines woman, the countess--lots of other instances. I respect and honor you more than any other man I have ever known. Any woman who really knew you would--_she must! And I know!_ Remember that wide-open two-way put me _in_ your mind for an instant--long enough--that let me understand something of the horrible weight you have to carry, something of the terrible power you must--for civilization--leash or release, direct and control. _I know_--no words you may say now can add to or change that single, full-view understanding I got then. "Listen, Kim. Read my mind, all of it. You will know me then, and understand me better than I can ever explain myself." "Have you got a picture of me doing that?" he asked flatly. "No, you big, unreasonable clunker, I haven't!" she flared, "and that's just what's driving me mad!" Then, voice dropping to a whisper, almost sobbing: "Cancel that, Kim--I didn't mean it. You wouldn't--you couldn't, I suppose, and still be you, the man I love. But isn't there something--_anything_--that will make you understand what I really am?" "I know what you are." Kinnison's voice was uninflected, weary. "As I told you before--the Universe's best. It's what I am that's clogging the jets. What I have been and what I have to keep on being. I simply don't rate up, and you'd better lay off me, Mac, while you can. There's a poem by one of the ancients--Kipling--the 'Ballad of Boh Da Thone'--that describes it exactly. You wouldn't know it--"