"Philip," she said, slowly, and looking at him steadily, "does it not strike you--do you not think--you are taking her acquiescence rather too much as a matter of course? Has Patricia no right to repudiate you, before even you endeavour to reclaim her?" He paused before he answered, and the lines about his mouth and eyes grew sterner and more defined. When he spoke he took his arm from the chimney-shelf, on which he had been resting, as though disdaining that slight support, and his voice sounded harsh and uncompromising. "Has she that right, Esther? Has she not rather by her own actions cut herself adrift from the usual consideration granted to women? Did she consider me, when she cast me off so lightly? And for what, forsooth? Because I was a too eager and too rustic a lover; because my outward appearance offended her hypercritical eyes; because she was but a butterfly of the hour, as vain and frivolous as the frailest _cigale_ of a summer's hour; and because her world, before which she shone as a bright particular star--and oh, what a little, trifling world it was!--and over which she reigned as a queen, repudiated me. I was not of their mode; I was not a _super-chic_; I could not speak their _argot_, or join in their light impertinent persiflage. I was too honest, Esther, for her world--too honest and too brutally straightforward, and so--she threw me over." "She was young, Philip," pleaded Mrs. Newbold, "young and flattered and spoilt. Cannot you now make allowance for her surroundings then, and understand how terrible and impossible poverty, imperious poverty, seemed to her? You, who so well appreciate the luxuries of life now, cannot you put yourself in Patricia's place, and judge from her standpoint, and see with her eyes, what it meant, when you asked her to fling her old life behind her, and start on a new and untried one, with you alone, and you only as recompense and compensation?" "If she had loved me," broke in Mr. Tremain, "she would not have considered, she would not have hesitated; my love and my devotion would have weighed heavier with her than all the baubles and gewgaws of her fashionable life." For all answer to this Mrs. Newbold laughed, throwing back her pretty head, and throwing out her pretty hands dramatically.