"It is this that is slowly causing your strength to ebb," he went on; "it is this acid which is corroding your life."
She gasped. "But it is a very real and additional pain," she exclaimed hoarsely.
"It is, of course," he assented. "It would be absurd to ignore it. Just as it would be absurd to ignore the extra filip which your presence, or your part in the business, adds to this, Leonetta's first affair. For what is a man to her, after all? Another feather in her cap,—another bauble! She has left school and her maiden's vanity,—we'll call it self-esteem,—bids her at once try to confirm the high claims she rightly thinks her beauty and her sex entitle her to make upon the world. She wants to win her first crown as May Queen. No deeper passion is involved. And should a man be induced, in his arrogance, to take these first steps of hers seriously, she would regret all her life what was merely a schoolgirl's whim. For society would take no pity on her, and would compel her to spend her life with a creature of whom she had only solicited the flattery of a season."
Cleopatra bowed her head, and toyed nervously with a bracelet. She was breathing heavily, but was now showing no desire to escape.
"But there is a difference, a very deep difference," he continued, "between the purchaser of a pearl necklet and the purchaser of a loaf of bread. The first is acquiring merely another ornament, another set-off to her beauty, another weapon in the fight for supremacy, and she performs the act with a frivolous smile. The other is obtaining a primitive and fundamental necessity, and she does it solemnly, aware as she is of its real uses. The first is the schoolgirl receiving her first attentions from a man; the second is the woman of passion who knows what life has promised her."
"Lord Henry," Cleopatra ejaculated, "how wonderfully you understand!"
"What aggravates your pain a thousandfold is the thought you are being robbed of a necessity, by one who uses it as a toy. You feel as a starving child might feel who sees the loaf that has been snatched from him being used as a football."
A tear trickled down Cleopatra's face. "That is wonderfully true," she assented, and brushed the tear quickly away.
He paused and looked at her for a moment beneath lowered brows. A wonderful serenity had come upon her, and her lips no longer seemed tormented with words they did not dare to utter.
"What is so terrible, Lord Henry," she said at last, "what the world does not seem to understand, and will not see, is that a girl with a sister is placed in intimate, daily, and inevitable contact with the very woman who is her most constant and most formidable rival. She sees her grow up and gradually assume womanly shape. She watches the development of every feature with eyes starting out of her head with horror. While her sister is at the gawky age, she gets a short breathing space, because a child at that time is so clumsy, so unattractive and foolish. But all of a sudden this vanishes. The child becomes a woman, startlingly beautiful and seductive. She realises it herself, and naturally wants her successes, as Baby did."