"I don't see anything amusing about it," he said bluntly. He was angry and sore, and this ill-timed merriment irritated him. "Don't you? Then you must have lost your sense of humour. This young man," she continued, pointing at him, as if she were exhibiting him to a crowd. "This good young man, who preaches me sermons on self-respect--who is concerned for my good name--who thinks I've been too careless of my reputation, who is cut to the heart because I do not live up to the ideal to which he considers a woman should attain, who has just done me the honour to ask my hand in marriage--not because he loves me--oh dear, no--but because he feels it his duty to save me from myself. This practical young man, who combines pleasure with duty, by conducting an _affaire du coeur_, in a neighbouring farmhouse, with my friend's wife, but whose morality is so outraged at the man who is courteous enough to permit that wife to get the divorce, that he can't bear to be in the same room with him. This superlatively excellent young man, who had almost persuaded me that I was wrong in my estimate of human nature, turns out to be the worst of the lot, a whitened sepulchre of lying and hypocrisy and deceit--or perhaps I should sum it all up and say--a model of diplomacy. Isn't it funny--isn't it cruelly, wickedly humorous? Do you wonder I laugh?" "If you can believe this of me, Miss Fitzgerald----" began the Secretary, who had flushed, and then turned as white as a sheet. "One story's good till another is told, my dear Jimsy; but I was wrong to have laughed. I quite understand, believe me, the painfulness of your position." "I tell you it's not true----" he began. "Oh, don't try to improve the situation. You can't"--she continued, rising and towering before him in the majesty of her wrath. "I'd really come to believe that there was one among the hundreds of worthless, vicious, mercenary human beings I know, who called themselves men, who was what he claimed to be; who really believed in the old fallacies of right and duty, and moral cleanliness, and lived up to them; who really kept the ten commandments in thought as well as in act, a strong rock of defence to whom I might cling in time of trouble; but he's a fraud like all the rest, and the man I made a hero turns out to be of clay!" She paused, and the Secretary, controlling himself, replied coldly: "After what you've said, it's of course worse than useless for me to repeat the question I asked you just before Colonel Darcy intruded his presence upon us. It had better remain unanswered." "No," she said. "I don't think so. It needs an answer, and you shall have it--but not yet. I've been a little fool, and have been punished for my folly; but I don't know any reason why I should make you suffer. You're only as you were made. You can't help it, I dare say." "You surely can't think of marrying me, believing what you do."