Gerard smiles contemptuously. "I do believe that you women lose the sight of your eyes when you look at one another." "What do you mean?" she asks, with some animation. "Is it possible that you don't agree with me as to her being quite _passée?_" "I think her, as I always thought her," he answers, steadily, "the loveliest woman I ever beheld; a little additional thinness or paleness does not affect her much. Hers is not mere skin beauty: as you say, tastes differ, and I like _those black women_." "That is a civil speech to make to me!" she answers, reddening--an insult to her appearance or her clothes being the one weapon that has power to pierce the scales of her armour of proof. St. John smiles again. "When we engaged to marry one another, did we also engage to think each other the handsomest specimens of the human animal Providence ever framed?" "It is, at least, not usual for a man to express an open preference for another woman to the girl to whom he is engaged." "It is no question of _preference_," he answers, quietly. "I had no thought of drawing any comparison between you and Miss Craven at the moment; I was not thinking of you." "You said she was _the_ loveliest girl you had ever seen!" objects Constance, pouting. "So I did--I do think her so," he rejoins, calmly. "If there is some defect in my eyes, hindering me from seeing things as they are, it is my misfortune, not my fault. Cannot you be content," he asks, banteringly, "with being the _next loveliest?_" She turns away her head, too indignant to answer. He changes his tone. "Constance," he says, gravely, "when I proposed to you, did not I tell you, honestly, what I could give you and what I could not? Love (odd as it may sound between engaged people), and the blind admiration that accompanies love, I had not got to offer you; this is true, is not it?" "Perfectly true," she answers, resentfully; "and as I am not, nor ever was, one of those inflammable young ladies, who think that _burning_, and _consuming_, and _melting_ are essential to married happiness, I did not much regret its absence. I have always been brought up to think," she continues, having recourse to the high moral tone which is her last sure refuge, "that respect and esteem are the best basis for two people to go upon, and I think so still." "But do you and I respect and esteem one another?" he asks, half-cynically, half-mournfully. "Is it possible that I can respect you, who, though you did not care, or affect to care, two straws about me personally--though you knew, at the time I asked you to marry me, that I was madly in love with another woman--were yet willing to give yourself to me, soul and body--to be bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh, because I was a good _parti_, as the vile phrase goes? And as for me," he ends, in bitter self-contempt, "what is there in all my idle wasted life, from beginning to end, that any one can respect or esteem?"