"I'm sorry if you're shocked"--all his cruelty wanted to shock her, to see her fastidiousness in degradation--"but I'm trying to tell you the truth--just for a change. If you persist in your saintliness, there's only one course open to me. Another Renée! A man can't live without a woman. It isn't fair to his nature. It isn't healthy." "Healthy!" she burst out. "Yes. Healthy. Does that upset you?" Her eyes blazed as she answered: "How dare you talk to me like that? How dare you? Healthy! I suppose that was your idea when you married _me_. You took me--medicinally." "Aliette!" Her fury cowed the cruelty in him. "I married you because I loved you. I love you still." "Love!" Her cheeks kindled. Caution was ripped loose from her as a sail is ripped loose by the wind. The shreds of it flapped against her mind, infuriating her. That this man who might have been father of her children should cloak his lusts with that divine word, seemed the ultimate defilement. "Love!" Her breasts heaved. "Don't talk to me of love. Talk of your rights, of your health, if you like; but spare me the degradation of what it pleases you to call your love." At that, definitely, the lawyer in Brunton suspected. Black thoughts drove and drove, thunder-cloud-like, across the sky of his mind; and through the rifts in those thunder-clouds his mind saw two visions--his wife, infernally desirable, infernally distant from the reach of his desires, and a woman to be probed, a hostile witness for cross-examination. "You speak as though you were an authority on the subject," he sneered; and, as she deigned no answer, "a saintly authority." "You're insolent." The last shred of her caution parted. "Insolent." "Perhaps"--his voice dropped two full tones--"I have the right to be insolent." "Explain yourself, please." He came so close to her that she could see every pore in the skin of his face. "I should hardly have thought an explanation necessary. I said, 'Perhaps I have the right to be insolent.' It is for you to explain why"--his lips worked--"you regard 'what I am pleased to call my love for you' as a degradation." "And if I refuse to explain?" "There is only one conclusion to be drawn." "And that is?" she dared him. Abruptly, Brunton the lawyer became Brunton the husband. He no longer wanted to cross-examine; he wanted to possess--to possess this woman. Why should he not possess her? She was as much his as the furniture in his home, the books in his chambers. By law and by religion, she owed him her body. He had always been chivalrous to her; he had always tried to fall in with her whimsies, to be kind. _She_ had never been kind. All she had tried to do was to hurt him. "And that conclusion is?" she flung at him.