"I have admitted, Dennis Montague," she said breathlessly, "that I came here because you fascinated me. It's true; you have always fascinated me. But I tell you that down in my heart I loathe you, detest you, for the coward that you are." Montague drew back as though fired upon by a masked battery. "In all the years I have known you," she went on furiously, as though fearing that her courage would leave her before the finish, "you have done nothing that was not selfish, mean, and cowardly--above everything else, cowardly. Look at the girls you have known----" Montague interrupted her with an impatient gesture, but she went on: "More than a dozen I could name have given you the depth and the sweetness of their first love, inspired by you, called forth by you. Do you realize what a woman's heart is and what she gives with it? And you--you are too cowardly to face marriage, too cowardly to love with your own heart--too selfish to leave women's hearts alone." Montague took a cigarette-case from his pocket. "May I smoke?" he said coolly. "You are a coward about your profession as well," she hurried on, ignoring his interruption. "Your mother, I know, had great dreams for you. She planned, worked, sacrificed for you. Yet you are too much of a coward seriously to face competition with what you choose to call 'the little legal minds of the city.'" "And thirdly?" he said, lighting a cigarette. "Yes, thirdly," she said desperately, although his easy nonchalance was fast undermining her courage, "you are not in the army. Yet no one could say that Dennis Montague is not fit. I can only presume, like every one else, that you are afraid." "And lastly?" He was still calm, although keener eyes than hers would have noticed a dark, ominous flush under his eyes. "And, lastly," she said, unconsciously repeating his formula, "you scoff at everything that is good and pure, sneering at religion, and drawing yourself aside from your fellow-creatures as though they were loathsome. Yet I say to you, Dennis, that there is not a man in the slums whose soul isn't far, far richer than yours. It is only a coward, afraid to face the real things, who scoffs at life." Weak from the effort she had made, her voice subsided into silence and a cold sweat broke out on her brow and the palms of her hands. "Will you smoke, Vera?" "No, thanks," she answered faintly. "Do. It would soothe you." "No, I thank you." She repressed a sudden desire to fly from the conservatory. She had become suddenly afraid of the cool, smiling figure beside her. "As far as girls are concerned," he said quietly, replacing the cigarette-case in his pocket, "just as long as they angle for us with every artifice of dress and rouge and coquetry, so long will they catch us and the consequences. As for the law, which my mother planned for me, I regret that my father left me the instincts of a gentleman, not of an attorney. I am not boring you?" She made no reply.