"No, of course not," she went on in her fury. "Of course it hurts when it's the other way! But when you strike at my name you plume yourself on being a hero, and prate about your debt to the dead!"
She stopped, at last, panting, out of breath. Her thin hands were shaking with the paroxysm of her fury, and her lips were bloodless. "Oh, if I were a man!" she cried at him. Then she sank into her chair, still breathing heavily, scarcely knowing where her fierce torrent of vituperation had left her.
"But you wouldn't do this wrong, you wouldn't?" she almost pleaded, holding her hand over her heart. "You don't know how hard I've struggled for my place in the world; you don't know what I've gone through; what I have suffered and known! Do you—do you think I would give that all up now, lightly, and without a word—and for an empty mistake? Do you think," she cried with a rising and more defiant voice as her strength came back to her again, "do you think that I would let any one come and rob me of this, without fighting them to the end? Do you think that because I'm a woman I can't fight? that you can throw me down in the dirt and walk over me, without a word? Do you? You fool!"
Through that turbulent darkness a far-away glimmer of light came to her, and she clutched at it eagerly.
"Now I will tell you the truth," she cried. "I will give you the truth about your dead man and his book. It was I who worked and slaved for that dead man. Without me his book would never have been written. While you, who call yourself his friend, who rant about being his defender, were loitering about the continent, I was at his bedside, tending him and watching him, wearing myself out for him, and keeping the life in him hour by hour. And it was to me, on his last day, that he gave the book, with his own hands made me take it, what there was of it. It was as much mine as his, he declared, and he gave it to me with his own hand. Do you hear?—with his own hand! And it was I who worked over it, and rewrote it word for word, and took it and made it my own!"
Repellier looked at her in silence for many minutes.
"But why did you take it?" he asked.
"It was mine! I had earned it!" Her eyes shone out at him hatefully. "I had earned it, I tell you!"
Repellier seemed deep in thought; then a new firmness came about the lines of his mouth, and he looked up at her.
"What new insult now?" she cried, tauntingly.