"Maybe for your sake. Yes! there was an instant when I said I would kill him and free you from him." She could not answer. He heard the rustle of her dress and added quickly, "Now, don't go. Of all nights, to-night is the night I can't spare you."
"I thought it was the one when you didn't need me."
"I need you to listen. I'm a blaring, trumpeting egotist to-night. Please understand me! Stop being a woman a minute, and see how it would seem to be a man—not like me, but free to live and sin and refuse to sin."
"You are free," she said, in her low, pained voice. "You have refused all the ignoble things."
"Ah, but I didn't even parley with them. I wish I could feel I'd whacked them and broken their skulls instead of going the other way."
"Playmate," she cried, "you are all wrong. You must not parley with them. You must refuse to look at them."
"Refuse to look at the worm that eats the root? No. Find him and stamp on him. The worst of it is, I begin to be rather terrified. I see that life is a bigger thing than I thought."
"Not to grannie. To her it's big and simple."
"Because she knows the way. Well, what if there are many ways,—not like hers, not the true way,—but ways we ought to look at before we can say we know life at all? Think of it, playmate. You are a woman, younger than I, delicate as a rose; yet you know more about life than I. You know how to meet men and women. There aren't surprises you can't master."
She sat wondering what it was that had moved him, and whether it was not simply the power of MacLeod's personality, equally compelling to love or hate. But Osmond was going on in that fierce monologue.