"Yes--now. I've seen the rest, and if I love, it's the young, the beautiful, the past. I won't explain: you must experience to comprehend! Another thing about yourself that you don't understand: to love and to be loved are two different things. A woman like you will always be loved. You won't love, really love, not for a long while--not until you begin to grow old! What stops you from using me? Family? You have none! Friends? Bah!" "And the man?" she said coldly, beginning fiercely to resent the brutality of his philosophy, though she had determined to remain impersonal and amused. "The man!" He laughed, throwing himself back in his chair, scowling a little at this direct personal allusion. "There you have it! With one question you have betrayed your whole morality--woman's morality! The man! If I were a young cub with a romantic strut, talking big, it would be different; it would not be a case of selling yourself--it would be an infatuation!" "Perhaps it is our morality," she said indignantly, thinking of Massingale, and led insensibly into a defensive attitude. "Say it is! It's at least natural!" "You mean, in my case, the thing that makes you recoil is myself?" he said abruptly. "More than any other consideration? Say it!" "Quite true!" "If I were asking you to marry me, if you had that opportunity, would that feeling stop you?" She was silent, surprised. "It's a money transaction in either case, isn't it?" "What a terrible view of life you have!" she said, appalled. She had been prepared for danger of an overt character, not for the insidious subtle poisoning which he was distilling in her ears. She drew back, breathing quickly, fiercely resisting his ideas. "Money, money--that's all you see, because that's all you understand!" "I only wish to make you see!" he said, shrugging his shoulders, "that there is no difference in being what I offer you and in being--" "Mrs. Sassoon!" she said curtly. He did not like the reference, man-like, though he frowned and admitted the allusion with a wave of his fingers. "As you wish!" Then he continued, with an unwonted energy for his tired attitude: "No, I don't say everything can be controlled by money, but that our world is. There are two sorts of human beings: those who work, and those who live for pleasure. It's the last we're talking about. What are you? You're a nervous, pretty little animal that has learned to love luxury. You may know it, or you may not. You may have had the taste of it before you came here, but you've steeped yourself in it since. You couldn't help yourself! It's all about you; it's the corruption in every street; it's New York! Don't you think I know you? What were you thinking as you stood before that window to-night?" "Yes, I love luxury!" she said abruptly, admitting it to shut him off.