"'But since you knew him so well, you must have known what he was about from the first moment,' I broke in; and, Ronnie, it was a dangerous protest, for his last few words about Antony's 'inevitability' had brought my anger against him back again. It was my love in arms against some treachery he had licenced--and even the way he looked at me, his eyes dark with pain, didn't soften the silence with which I awaited the explanation that he must make. And a helpless gesture of his hand, the very manner of his explaining, showed that he knew now, now, that no explanation could be good enough, however fully he had once accepted it; that now, and just lately, there had happened something between us that discounted all previous acquiescences to 'inevitability.' ... And he spoke now without a trace of that rather grim fantasy with which he always chose to obscure his most serious moods. "'Don't you realise Iris, that the man who stopped Antony in Jermyn Street, the man you married, was very different to the man who played host to Antony's tomfoolery on that Nigel Poole night? with you sitting there at the table, and indifference the only apparent fact about your face except its loveliness. Didn't you realise at all that I had changed, and very much? But then how silly to ask that, for you and I never talked of such things, if we talked at all. "'In those two years my whole view of life, my ambitions, and I once had so very many! had gone awry. Or rather, they had withered, got sour, don't you see? Of all Antony's many follies his greatest was ever to envy me my success--for the penalty of that success went with the very nature of the man who succeeded. Iris, I had to realise I was a bad winner long before I realised I was a bad loser.... I was just about realising it when I fell in love with you. And that pulled me up, indeed it did. Love for you created something worth while winning, worth succeeding about.... I'm trying to tell you that everything had been too easy for me all my life. I suppose one was always just a little rotten with sophistication, and so, as one played and won every throw, the winnings seemed so little worth while--until you came! My dear, I thought I'd have to fight for you--and you so worth fighting for, you with those mysterious cornstalks in place of hair! I didn't tell myself that I wanted to fight for you, but I must have had it at the back of my mind--for I was so disappointed, angry, when I found that I hadn't to fight, that you were as easy to win as everything else. Iris, that was terrible of you, why did you fall so easily and quickly? Why didn't you pull me up, why didn't you resist at all, at all?... I loved you, never any one nor anything more than you. And so much that I simply couldn't believe that any one I wanted so passionately could so easily give herself! The gift seemed to grow less in such giving, I couldn't believe but in the surface of the thing. If I hadn't loved you so much, my dear, I would have been