A curious look came into her eyes,--a far-away strained look of hungry yearning, mingled, as I thought, with compassion for me. "Yes, it is there!" she answered slowly--"And it is of our own mutual creation. I believe you have something nobler in your nature, Geoffrey, than I have in mine,--an indefinable something that recoils from me and my theories despite your wish and will. Perhaps if you had given way to that feeling in time, you would never have married me. You speak of the loveliest side of love,--to me there is no lovely side,--it is all coarse and horrible! You and I for instance,--cultured man and woman,--we cannot, in marriage, get a flight beyond the common emotions of Hodge and his girl!" She laughed violently, and shuddered in my arms. "What liars the poets are, Geoffrey! They ought to be sentenced to life-long imprisonment for their perjuries! They help to mould the credulous beliefs of a woman's heart;--in her early youth she reads their delicious assurances, and imagines that love will be all they teach,--a thing divine and lasting beyond earthly countings;--then comes the coarse finger of prose on the butterfly-wing of poesy, and the bitterness and hideousness of complete disillusion!" I held her still in my arms with the fierce grasp of a man clinging to a spar ere he drowns in mid-ocean. "But I love you Sibyl!----my wife, I love you!" I said, with a passion that choked my utterance. "You love me,--yes, I know, but how? In a way that is abhorrent to yourself!" she replied--"It is not poetic love,--it is man's love, and man's love is brute love. So it is,--so it will be,--so it must be. Moreover the brute-love soon tires,--and when it dies out from satiety there is nothing left. Nothing, Geoffrey,--absolutely nothing but a blank and civil form of intercourse, which I do not doubt we shall be able to keep up for the admiration and comment of society!" She disengaged herself from my embrace, and moved towards the house. "Come!" she added, turning her exquisite head back over her shoulder with a feline caressing grace that she alone possessed, "You know there is a famous lady in London who advertises her saleable charms to the outside public by means of her monogram worked into the lace of all her window-blinds, thinking it no doubt good for trade! I am not quite so bad as that! You have paid dearly for me I know;--but remember I as yet wear no jewels but yours, and crave no gifts beyond those you are generous enough to bestow,--and my dutiful desire is to give you as much full value as I can for your money." "Sibyl, you kill me!" I cried, tortured beyond endurance, "Do you think me so base----" I broke off with almost a sob of despair.