Laura Marton, sitting sideways with one white arm along the top of the lounge and the sweep of her amber-coloured skirts against his feet, bent forward insistently towards him; a braid of gold across her splendid shoulders, and a band of turquoise in her brown hair. The long soft fawn gloves were crumpled in her lap, and her left arm, which hung straight and bare beside her, tapped a turquoise fan against her ankle as she waited for his reply. "I know," he sighed. "You don't and you can't see it: what's the use of my saying it again? You're sure no woman would care for what I'm giving her, if she only knew. I daresay; but, you see, she's not going to know. She's going to luxuriate in an apparent adoration. That's easier than to be happy with one that's inapparent, however actual. And it's a lot likelier that the make-believe will last; because--well, because there's nothing in it not to." He smiled whimsically at his own English, but the girl's face darkened with a frown. "It makes no difference how you put it," she exclaimed hotly; "the thing's detestable! You'll only look at it from your point of view; and because it's costing you so much, you think it must be worth all that to the girl. But it's not! You're getting her life, and everything that's in her and of her, and you're getting it for a lie! You think it's a fine lie, I know, the sort of lie that life is all along. You've told me that! Oh, yes, you have; or something like it. But what are _you_ that you should handle a woman as if you had made her, and lie to her like a god! Do you think you're big enough to make that seem fair?" "Ah, you don't understand," he murmured still staring before him, afraid to stir the fire in her smouldering eyes. "I'm doing this because I'm so small." Her incredulous gasp was almost a repudiation; but she said nothing and he went on: "Because the love that's worth perfidies and desertion and all the other personal superlatives will never come my way. I thought it would: yes! once, long ago. But it hasn't, and it won't. If I was big enough!"--he caught his breath--"Ah, that's another matter. For _that_ love excuses everything--'red ruin and the breaking up of laws'--because it's bigger, and better, and more enduring than the world itself. But it isn't mine." He stopped, and faced for an instant the furious blaze of her eyes. Then he said more slowly: "So the next best thing seemed, for a man like me, to make a good girl's dreams come true; her dreams of love, and honour, and a man's desire ... when one is the man, and can." "You're not the man!" she cried. "And it's wicked and cruel to pretend to be."