“Well,” answered Moon, “that Beacon House is a certain rather singular sort of house—a house with the tiles loose, shall we say? Innocent Smith is only the doctor that visits us; hadn’t you come when he called before? As most of our maladies are melancholic, of course he has to be extra cheery. Sanity, of course, seems a very bumptious eccentric thing to us. Jumping over a wall, climbing a tree—that’s his bedside manner.” “You daren’t say such a thing!” cried Rosamund in a rage. “You daren’t suggest that I—” “Not more than I am,” said Michael soothingly; “not more than the rest of us. Haven’t you ever noticed that Miss Duke never sits still—a notorious sign? Haven’t you ever observed that Inglewood is always washing his hands— a known mark of mental disease? I, of course, am a dipsomaniac.” “I don’t believe you,” broke out his companion, not without agitation. “I’ve heard you had some bad habits—” “All habits are bad habits,” said Michael, with deadly calm. “Madness does not come by breaking out, but by giving in; by settling down in some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by being tamed. YOU went mad about money, because you’re an heiress.” “It’s a lie,” cried Rosamund furiously. “I never was mean about money.” “You were worse,” said Michael, in a low voice and yet violently. “You thought that other people were. You thought every man who came near you must be a fortune-hunter; you would not let yourself go and be sane; and now you’re mad and I’m mad, and serve us right.” “You brute!” said Rosamund, quite white. “And is this true?” With the intellectual cruelty of which the Celt is capable when his abysses are in revolt, Michael was silent for some seconds, and then stepped back with an ironical bow. “Not literally true, of course,” he said; “only really true. An allegory, shall we say? a social satire.” “And I hate and despise your satires,” cried Rosamund Hunt, letting loose her whole forcible female personality like a cyclone, and speaking every word to wound. “I despise it as I despise your rank tobacco, and your nasty, loungy ways, and your snarling, and your Radicalism, and your old clothes, and your potty little newspaper, and your rotten failure at everything. I don’t care whether you call it snobbishness or not, I like life and success, and jolly things to look at, and action. You won’t frighten me with Diogenes; I prefer Alexander.” “Victrix causa deæ—” said Michael gloomily; and this angered her more, as, not knowing what it meant, she imagined it to be witty. “Oh, I dare say you know Greek,” she said, with cheerful inaccuracy; “you haven’t done much with that either.” And she crossed the garden, pursuing the vanished Innocent and Mary.