She could not find words to answer him. She sat looking at him in a silence of anger, consciously giving way to its onrush because it seemed to carry her further from that moment of weakness. Then words broke from her in a hot torrent. "Then all you said just now was a lie!" she cried. "You are capable of jealousy and of revenge. You were angry because she tried to harm you, so you decided you would harm her more than she could possibly harm you. And you were jealous, because she was young and lovely, and she didn't love you. That was really her unforgivable sin, wasn't it, that she didn't love you, so you revenged yourself for that most of all!" Even as she spoke it struck Megan that anger was a strange thing for her to be feeling so overwhelmingly at this moment. The pathos of Mah-li's death had not yet touched her, the enigma of that purposeless little life. And more in compunction for her own blind violence she exclaimed: "Poor little Mah-li! Oh, I should have kept her with me. I shouldn't have trusted her with you at all. But how could I know what you were? A brute, yes, just a bully and a brute!" The General's voice broke in harshly. "Not at all." His calm was imposed now only by a mighty effort. The nerve over his eyelid throbbed visibly. "Of course you would want to see Mah-li's punishment in some such light. I knew that by the reasons you advanced against it, by your hysterical manner when you urged them. You were so carried beyond yourself that if it had been of no particular importance I would have been glad to do what you asked. But it was important, and not at all because of my individual feeling. Mah-li behaved in a way which, for reasons I'm not able to understand, you find admirable. Why, one would imagine that you found rebellion admirable of itself! Well, fortunately society does not. Mah-li had a definite place in society, just as a bowl is meant to be shapely and to hold wine, tea or water. If the bowl were no longer shapely and wouldn't hold anything I would throw it out. Mah-li had made of herself an ugly, useless, an incongruous object. I threw her out. Not from revenge or jealousy, which are as bad as rebellion. No. But as a man who wants his house and his world full of peace and propriety and harmony." Megan was silent. "Am I quite clear?" he insisted.