"Love and hate! What have I to do with the loves and hates of men as I know them? Shall I step to right or to left for all that? I play out my part in the eternal game. I live my life!" "But you don't live your life! You miss ... everything! If you would but be kind instead of cruel; open-hearted and generous always ... you have in you the seeds of all that. Then men might come to know the real _you_; you could make them love instead of hate...." But his eyes stabbed at her like quickened blue flames. "So!" he said, and his tone was one of bitter mockery. "If I choose to pay them for the pretty, empty compliment, they will call me a good fellow and ... love me! If I kick them they will call me villain and hate me. And there you have the epitome of that so-called love and hate of mankind which sickens me. I'll be eternally damned before I prostitute my immortal soul to pitch pennies out for a peck of treacherous hearts. For, I tell you, girl ... Only Girl ... the love that is to be bought is to be spat upon. I'll have none of it. Even your love, that I'd give my soul to have freely, I'd have none of if it were to be bought." Lynette looked at him strangely, half pityingly. And she answered him softly: "You twist things out of all reason to make, to yourself, your own acts appear something other than they are." "A girl trying to turn logician?" he laughed at her, teasing. Little effort on his part was required to set fire to her quick inflammable temper. "It's magnanimous of you to jeer at me," she retorted hotly. "Because you have the physical strength of a beast and the beast's lack of understanding...." Now his golden outburst of laughter stopped her. He shouted: "See! There you go! As if to preach me the final word of love and hate! You'd hate me now, just because I tease you! If I said, with poets' roses twining through the saying, that you were most beautiful and no-end intellectual and beyond that of the heart of an angel, could you not better tolerate me? And thus we come to the open pathway to most human loves and hates; two little doors standing side by side. For, I ask you, going back to your challenge to make men love rather than despise me, what in the devil's name is that sort of _love_ but transplanted self-love? A damned-fool sort of selfishness masking like a hypocrite as something quite different.... If you loved a man who beat you there would be something worth while in that sort of loving; something divorced from plain selfishness and the eternal I-want-to-get-all-I-can-out-of-everything! Now, I love you! I love you so that my love for you comes near killing me! It gets me by the throat at night. That's love; and there's less of self in it, I swear to you, than there is of ... _you!_" "You! You talk of love. To me!"