"It was a virtuous attachment this time. I am nearly forty. I am getting grey and stout. Young women have a difficulty in perceiving my existence. It was high time to settle, and to live on some attractive woman's money. There are thousands of women who must marry someone. So why not me? I found the attractive woman. I walked into love with her," he stammered with anger. "I regarded it as a constitutional. But the attractive woman, though she liked me a little, weighed the pros and cons exactly as I had done, and decided not to take her constitutional in my impecunious company. She refused me when I was poor, and _now_--now that I am rich--she is willing." The harsh voice ceased suddenly. Magdalen looked for a moment at the savage, self-tortured face, and her heart bled. "That is how I have treated you," he said, choking with passion. "Now you know the truth of me--for the first time. That is the kind of man I am, hard and vindictive and selfish to the core: the man whom you have idealised, whom you have put on a pedestal all these years." "I have known always the kind of man you were," she said steadily. "I never idealised you, as you call it. I loved you knowing the worst of you. Otherwise my love could not have endured through. A foolish idealism would have perished long ago." "And then I come down here, on a sudden despicable impulse, intending to use you as a weapon to strike her with, not that she is worth striking, poor feeble pretty toy. And I encouraged myself in a thin streak of patronising sentiment for you. I wrote a little cursed sonnet in the train how old affection outlasts youthful passion, like violets blooming in autumn. How loathsome! How incredibly base! And then, when my temper is aroused by your opposition, I am dastardly enough, heartless enough to try to humiliate you by shewing you those letters, to try to revenge myself on you. On you, Magdalen! On you! On you!" She did not speak nor move. Her face was awed, as the face of one who watches beside the pangs of death or--birth. Outside in the amber sunset a thrush piped.