"I swear before God, my Maker, that this is the--No! No! I will _not_!" she cried hysterically. "I will not! It is all some trick, some cowardly trap! Who are you--who _are_ you, to degrade me in this way? Who are you, that I must answer to you as to a judge? You are detaining me here; you are holding me a prisoner against my will!" He held up his hand restrainingly. "Yes, who are you?" she went on wildly, catching ludicrously at ineffectual trifles, as the drowning do. "Who, indeed, _are_ you? You, with your pharasaical long face and your own underhand schemes? You, closeted alone with married women--with a woman who has made a fool of herself for you, who can't even hide her infatuation! Who are you, who have come into a home and stolen an honorable wife's love away from her husband--who are you to sit up and prate of honor and honesty?" Again he threw up his hand, as though to ward back her termagancy, but she was not to be stopped. "Yes, who are you to sit in judgment on me, a woman, alone in the world, a woman who has asked nothing of you! If you are so immaculate," she mocked, "if you are so above suspicion, denounce me as the thief you have said I am! Denounce me; but do not forget that you yourself will soon stand before the world in your true colors!" He tried to silence her, but her passionate torrent was not to be stayed. "No, of course not," she went on in her fury. "Of course it hurts when it's the other way! But when you strike at _my_ name you plume yourself on being a hero, and prate about your debt to the dead!" She stopped, at last, panting, out of breath. Her thin hands were shaking with the paroxysm of her fury, and her lips were bloodless. "Oh, if I were a man!" she cried at him. Then she sank into her chair, still breathing heavily, scarcely knowing where her fierce torrent of vituperation had left her. "But you wouldn't do this wrong, you wouldn't?" she almost pleaded, holding her hand over her heart. "You don't know how hard I've struggled for my place in the world; you don't know what I've gone through; what I have suffered and known! Do you--do you think I would give that all up now, lightly, and without a word--and for an empty mistake? Do you think," she cried with a rising and more defiant voice as her strength came back to her again, "do you think that I would let any one come and rob me of this, without fighting them to the end? Do you think that because I'm a woman I can't fight? that you can throw me down in the dirt and walk over me, without a word? Do you? _You fool!_" Through that turbulent darkness a far-away glimmer of light came to her, and she clutched at it eagerly.