She stood perfectly still, looking straight into his eyes. He dropped his hands and sat down, saying sneeringly, ‘I always thought women were brutes, now I see it’s perfectly true.’ ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘women are brutes. If you had loved me, if you had believed in me, and trusted me last night, nothing would have made me leave you. I should not have cared if you had been a thief, or a murderer perhaps.’ Here he interrupted her. ‘Oh, don’t let us have all these heroics. I know it all: you’d go to hell for me, wouldn’t you, as long as I feed your insatiable passion for admiration? I’m sick of women and their melodramas.’ She stood still looking at him. ‘I’ll just tell you the plain facts of the case,’ he continued more calmly. ‘Our love was of that resistless kind, brought about when the appetite is so strong that every other faculty, all prudence, all considerations of every sort, are thrust on one side to gratify it. I admit it is a very charming state of things for the parties concerned, while it lasts, but it does not last long. Our delirium is over. You are a woman full of dreams and imaginations; you worry me with the persistent foolishness of your ideas and ideals. I am a man who knows all the moves, and the long and short of it is that I know how to play the game; you do not.’ ‘I shall soon learn, and perhaps my game will not be such a losing one as yours has been.’ ‘No one can tell, but the game is over sooner or later, and then it doesn’t matter much whether you have lost or won, the pleasure is in the game itself.’ ‘Perhaps it does matter.’ ‘I don’t think so. What really matters is letting your chessmen rule you, that is what all mediocre people do.’ ‘Why have you never talked seriously to me before?’ ‘Because you were in love with me.’ ‘What a horribly unscrupulous wretch you are!’ ‘In his relations with women a man has to act two parts: at first he must be Adam, young, ardent, and resistless, then he must be the serpent, able to teach her all wisdom of the world.’ ‘And is neither part a serious one?’ ‘That depends upon the woman. Now we’ll talk things over quietly. You want to go back to Horsham’s Theatre?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘But it’s no use your going on as you used to do.’ ‘No. I know I was very bad, but I think I shall be better now.’ ‘Well, let’s see what you’ve got in you, and then I shall know what is to be done.’ He put her through the balcony scene in _Romeo and Juliet_, making her cry with his severity, torturing her, and finding fault in every possible way with her efforts to express the feeling of the words she uttered. At the end of it she stood hopeless and dumfoundered at the new world opening before her. For the first time it dawned on her what acting really meant. She looked timidly at Travers. He was sitting in a chair watching her doubtfully. He said, ‘Yes, that’s very good. You work away at that, and we’ll do them all yet.’ ‘You think I can go back to Horsham’s Theatre?’