CHARTERIS. Call everybody, my darling--everybody in London. Now I shall no longer have to be brutal--to defend myself--to go in fear of you. How I have looked forward to this day! You know now that I don't want you to marry me or to love me: Paramore can have all that. I only want to look on and rejoice disinterestedly in the happiness of (kissing her hand) my dear Julia (kissing the other), my beautiful Julia. (She tears her hands away and raises them as if to strike him, as she did the night before at Cuthbertson's.) No use to threaten me now: I am not afraid of those hands--the loveliest hands in the world. JULIA. How have you the face to turn round like this after insulting and torturing me! CHARTERIS. Never mind, dearest: you never did understand me; and you never will. Our vivisecting friend has made a successful experiment at last. JULIA (earnestly). It is you who are the vivisector--a far crueller, more wanton vivisector than he. CHARTERIS. Yes; but then I learn so much more from my experiments than he does! And the victims learn as much as I do. That's where my moral superiority comes in. JULIA (sitting down again on the couch with rueful humour). Well, you shall not experiment on me any more. Go to your Grace if you want a victim. She'll be a tough one. CHARTERIS (reproachfully sitting down beside her). And you drove me to propose to her to escape from you! Suppose she had accepted me, where should I be now? JULIA. Where _I_ am, I suppose, now that I have accepted Paramore. CHARTERIS. But I should have made Grace unhappy. (Julia sneers). However, now I come to think of it, you'll make Paramore unhappy. And yet if you refused him he would be in despair. Poor devil! JULIA (her temper flashing up for a moment again). He is a better man than you. CHARTERIS (humbly). I grant you that, my dear. JULIA (impetuously). Don't call me your dear. And what do you mean by saying that I shall make him unhappy? Am I not good enough for him? CHARTERIS (dubiously). Well, that depends on what you mean by good enough. JULIA (earnestly). You might have made me good if you had chosen to. You had a great power over me. I was like a child in your hands; and you knew it. CHARTERIS (with comic acquiescence). Yes, my dear. That means that whenever you got jealous and flew into a violent rage, I could always depend on it's ending happily if I only waited long enough, and petted you very hard all the time. When you had had your fling, and called the object of your jealousy every name you could lay your tongue to, and abused me to your heart's content for a couple of hours, then the reaction would come; and you would at last subside into a soothing rapture of affection which gave you a sensation of being angelically good and forgiving. Oh, I know that sort of goodness! You may have thought on these occasions that I was bringing out your latent amiability; but I thought you were bringing out mine, and using up rather more than your fair share of it.