"Love me!" she cried scornfully. "You'd be proud of me! Why? When you answered you forgot to tell the truth, Mr. Hume. Because you need me, because you are beaten now and must come hiding a whimper under big words, come to a woman who holds you so in the hollow of her hand that she can break you so utterly that your own overweening conceit cannot find the fragments with the microscope of a distorted vanity! Love me as you'd love any other fine thing just because it was yours. Because you'd use me, because you see that such a wife as I could be would be but a stone for you to stand on to climb up a little higher. And you think that of all men in the world I should choose a man like _you_ for husband?" She jeered openly at him, disdaining to see the red anger flaring in his eyes. She remembered the reason that had brought her to him in the beginning and a savage gladness in her rejoiced at finding the victory all that she had yearned for. Her dominant blood was seething to the surface. And it was Hume blood. "Listen to me a minute," she cried sharply as he was about to speak. "You've come for straight talk to-day, you say. Let us have it then. You have gone your way boastfully, arrogantly, unscrupulously and it has been the fool's way. You are playing the losing game and it isn't even in you to lose like a man. You have stared at the glitter of gold so long that you have gone blind looking at it. Your own infallibility has loomed so large before you that you have lost your sanity. I say listen to me!" her voice ringing with its command. "I am going to tell you something. I am going to tell you why I came to you, why I suffered you day after day to come to me. And what I came for I am going to get. You are going to give it to me!" She had sprung to her feet, twin spots of colour upon her white cheeks, her eyes blazing. "You told me that you had paid five thousand dollars to Helga Strawn for her interest in the Dry Lands! Liar! You paid her twenty-five thousand!" "Well?" he snarled harshly. "What of it?" "You laughed about it. You said that she was a fool like most women. Like all women, was what you thought! And women were made just for you to tread upon and sneer at. You did not know that I knew a great deal more about Helga Strawn than you ever guessed!" "You--know--Helga--Strawn!" The words beat at her like stinging, separate blows. And now it had come into his eyes, the thing that had never been there, the thing that would never die out of the man's soul while life clung to him,--fear. "I know you, to the last spot you think you've covered up," she ran on swiftly. "So well that I know I am about to stir you into one of your mad fits of rage. And I am not afraid to do it. You'd kill me if you dared, but you won't dare. For after all I think that in your braggadocio way you are a coward, Sledge Hume." "You cat!" he flung at her with an attempt at his old manner.