Hermione drank the soup with perfect docility, and leaning back on her pillow began to speak in a low, fevered voice, with momentary pauses, but without intermission. Her eyes fixed themselves on Mr. Brett’s face with the intensity of the Ancient Mariner. Mr. Brett put down “The Casting Away of Mrs. Lecks and Mrs. Aleshine,” and leaned forward so that he could catch her low, hurrying voice without effort. The night light cast weird shadows on his grey face and deep-set, patient eyes. He listened without attempting to interrupt Hermione. She began with the story of her childhood. In the long hours of her delirium her mind had built up and stored an attractive pageant of her character, set in the gloomy pitfalls of her life. She told her father of the inner desolation of her childhood, her mother’s neglect, her nurse’s carelessness, his own inability to understand her or foster her affection for him. “You said I was a fighter,” she exclaimed bitterly, “this is what I had to fight.” She passed on swiftly to her girlhood, its outward triumphs and the shadowed internecine struggle between her beautiful young mother and herself. She struck again and again at the man beside her, pointing out to him his neglect, his lazy partisanship of his wife, chosen out of selfishness and fear. “You never helped me,” she said bitterly, “you only wanted peace.” She spoke of his careless consent to her European travels, the unsuitable chaperonage that had thrown her, young and inexperienced, into the fastest American set in Paris. Without hesitation or restraint she gave him the story of her marriage. Mr. Brett had heard it before, but there were details she had spared him, moments of her dressed-up sacrifices and of her attitude of outraged womanhood, which convinced her of her own sincerity. He was spared nothing now. He was told of every physical brutality and of every irregular, inconsiderate word forced out of Prince Girla. Hermione had never forgotten a word that had displeased her, nor had she ever let his tenderness or repentance wash out a single stain. There had never been a moment when Hermione was not in her own eyes an heroic, persecuted figure. She had kept her code unspotted from an alien and repulsive world. The mere facts of life were outrages upon her delicacy of temperament, and her rigid acceptance of propriety was a loophole by which she had escaped self-surrender. Her low, exhausted voice moved on with the persistence of a gimlet. She stood surrounded by her negative virtues, covered with the insults of her foes, as St. Sebastian stands in old Tuscan pictures, imperturbable under a lacework of arrows. Her eyes never left her father’s face: this picture, this continuous exposition of herself, was her answer to him. She had been horribly startled by the unveiling of his point of view; her self-control had been stabbed into an acute resistance.