"Do you think," she expostulated to his stricken silence, "that if I'd cared in the least I'd have made it so easy for you? Can't you see that it was all arranged, that we _jumped_ at you?" All the time she sat opposite him, thrusting swift and hard, there was no diminution of her appealing beauty, the flaming rose of her cheeks and the soft, dark flare of her hair. As if she felt how it belied at every turn the quality of her unyielding intention, her voice railed against him feverishly. "I suppose you think I'm mercenary, and I thought I was, too. You don't know how people like us _need_ money sometimes. All the things we like _cost_ so--all the real things. And poor mamma, she needed things; she'd never had them, and I thought that I could stand being married to you if I could get them that way.... Maybe I could, you know, if you'd been different, more like us I mean. But there was such a lot you didn't understand ... things you hadn't even heard about. I found that out as soon as we were engaged. There wasn't a thing between us; not a _thing_." It poured scalding hot on Peter's sensitive surfaces: made sensitive by the way in which even in this hour her beauty moved him. He felt tears starting in his heart and prayed they might not come to his face. "So you see as we hadn't anything in common it would be better for us not to go on with it even"--she broke a little at this--"even if there hadn't been anybody else. You see that, don't you?" She dared him to deny it rather than begged the concession of him as she gathered herself for departure. "I see that." "You never really belonged to our set, you know----" She rose now and he rose blindly with her; he hoped that she was done, but there was something still. "It hasn't been easy to go through with it.... Mother isn't going to make it any easier. It's natural for her to want me to have everything that money would mean, and I thought that if you would just keep away from her ... you owe something to Burton and me for what we've been through, I think ... just leave it to me to manage in my own way...." "I shall never trouble you, Eunice." He came close to her then to open the door, seeing that she was to leave him, and he saw too that she had suffered, was at the very ebb and stony bottom of emotion as she hung for the moment in the doorway searching for some winged shaft of separation that should cut her off from the remotest implication of the situation. She found at last the barbedest. All the succeeding time after he closed the door on her was marked for Peter, not by the ticked moments but by successive waves of anguish as that poisoned arrow worked its way to his secret places. "It isn't as if I had ever loved you; I owe it to Mr. Henderson to remind you that I never said I did.... You know I never liked to have you kiss me."