"And he has given me a great deal of his," she retorted. "For nineteen years I have been his very dear friend. During all that time he has never broken a promise to me, never told a falsehood, never said a single word which could grate or hurt. If he has sometimes seemed a little aloof, it is because he really believes himself to be a great person. He believes in himself immensely, you know, James--in the privileges and sanctity of his descent. It seems so strange in this world, where we others see other things. If I only dared, I would write a novel about it." "But you don't care for him any more?" "Care for him?" she repeated. "How could I ever stop caring for him! He was my first lover, and has been my only one." "Let me ask you a question," James Borden demanded suddenly. "Don't you ever feel any grudge against him? He took you away from a very respectable position in life. He ruined all sorts of possibilities. He was fifteen or twenty years older than you were, and he knew the world. You pleased him, and he deliberately entrapped your affections. Be honest, now. Don't you sometimes hate him for it?" "Never," she answered without hesitation. "I was, as you say, most respectably placed--a teacher at a village school--and I might have married a young farmer, or bailiff's son, or, with great luck, a struggling young doctor, and lived a remarkably rural life, but, as you have observed, in great respectability. My dear James, I should have hated it. I was, I think, nineteen years old when Reginald, in a most courtly fashion, suggested that I should come to London with him, and I have exactly the same feelings to-day about my acceptance of his proposal as I had then." "You are a puzzle," he declared. "You wouldn't be, of course, only you're such a--such a good woman." "Of course I am, James," she laughed. "I am good, inasmuch as I am faithful to any tie I may make. I am kind, or try to be, to all my fellow creatures, and I should hate to do a mean thing. The only difference between me and other women is that I prefer to choose what tie I should consider sacred. I claimed the liberty to do that, and I exercised it. As to my right to do so, I have never had the faintest possible shadow of hesitation." "Oh, it all sounds all right when you talk about it," he admitted, "but let's come to the crux of this thing now we are about it, Marcia. I am eating my heart out for you. I should have thought that one of the great privileges of your manner of life was your freedom to change, if you desired to do so. Change, I mean--nothing to do with infidelity. You may have the nicest feelings in the world towards your Marquis, but I don't believe you love him any more. I don't believe you care for him as much as you do for me." "In one sense you are perfectly right," she acknowledged. "In another you are altogether wrong."