conditions, after all, what it can have been, but it makes you, doesn't it? the single case of your kind. If you had been spoiled there would have been no use--and of course as it is there's none. Only I can't help having just put it to you thus," she wound up, "that you've not been spoiled." There was no doubt of the nature of the effort made by Pendrel to do these remarks justice. "You do put it to me with the magnificence that attends every breath of your being. I haven't been spoiled--I see quite what you mean--I only _can_ be." "You only _will_ be," she said almost tenderly. "You'll be beautifully spoiled." "For _you_, that is, of course," Ralph went on. "For me--certainly. Isn't it only of myself after all that we're talking?" He answered nothing and the silence between them was for a little as if she had suddenly given him a chance. This effect moreover grew from what he finally said; which was after he had restlessly moved to the window, looked out thence for some instants and then come back. "You would definitely accept me if I did formally give up everything but this?"--and he jerked his head at the outer world of which he had with such intensity just renewed his impression. "Ah," she disappointingly answered, "I don't absolutely say that." Poor Pendrel again stared. "Then what do you say at all? Do you expect me to renounce for nothing?" "I don't expect you, as I've perfectly told you, in any degree to renounce. Why should you?" she added. "No one will ever have an idea of what you have lost." "No one but myself," he said with his eyes on her. "Oh I think you will least of all." She had answered so straight that it had almost the sound of levity; by the hint of which he was justly enough irritated. "It's too portentous--what you ask!" But she found for this her quickest reply. "I don't ask anything. It's you who ask. I only answer. I decline the honour of your hand, and I give my reasons. If I had given none I should have been doubtless less absurd, and my reward is that I'm not really sure I should have been even less cruel. I'm sure," she continued, "but of one thing--or rather perhaps of two: that I'm as insane as you please, but that I'm also as rigid. Don't think, at all events, that you need, or that you possibly _can_, tell me how my attitude strikes you. Do me the simple justice to believe that I know." So she appeared quietly to conclude, and it was in her quietness indeed that her perversity most showed; though this was in a manner an aid, if a lame one, to her suitor, called upon at a moment's notice both to measure its extent and to give up the hope of getting round it. "You call me a 'case,' but it seems to me you're at least as extraordinary a one."