He turned to her now and her eyes from across the room fixed themselves upon him.
"I will say them to you if you like," said Gregory, after a moment. He leaned against the side of the window and folded his arms. And he examined his wife with, apparently, the cold attention that he would have given to a strange witness in the box. And indeed she was strange to him. Over his aching and dispossessed heart he steeled himself in an impartial scrutiny.
"It is true, then," said Karen, "that you believe her tyrannous and dangerous and unscrupulous, and that you think her devoured by egotism, and hypocritical in her feeling for me, and that you hope that I may never see her again?"
She catalogued the morning's declarations accurately, like the witness giving unimpeachable testimony. But it was rather absurd to see her as the witness, when, so unmistakably, she considered herself the judge and him the criminal in the dock. There was relief in pleading guilty to everything. "Yes: it's perfectly true," he said.
She looked at him and he could discover no emotion on her face.
"Why did you not tell me this when you asked me to marry you?" she questioned.
"Oh—I wasn't so sure of it then," said Gregory. "And I loved you and hoped it would never come out. I didn't want to give you pain. That's why I never dared tell you, as you put it."
"You wanted to marry me and you knew that if you told me the truth I would not marry you; that is the reason you did not dare," said Karen.
"Well, there's probably truth in that," Gregory assented, smiling; "I'm afraid I was an infatuated creature, perhaps a dishonest one. I can't expect you to make allowances for my condition, I know."
She lowered her eyes and sat for so long in silence that presently, rather ashamed of the bitterness of his last words, he went on in a kinder tone: "I know that I can never make you understand. You have your infatuation and it blinds you. You've been blind to the way in which, from the very beginning, she has tracked me down. You've been blind to the fact that the thing that has moved her hasn't been love for you but spite, malicious spite, against me for not giving her the sort of admiration she's accustomed to. If I've come to hate her—I didn't in the least at first, of course—it's only fair to say that she hates me ten times worse. I only asked that she should let me alone."