“Madam,” he rejoined quietly, “I told him that you would not marry me.”
“I ask myself,” she went on, seeming to ignore him, “what I have ever done to justify these shameless solicitations by the shameless.” Her frigid self-possession, as a quality of sixteen, was a quite pitiful abnormity. “You are by all accounts, Monsieur,” she said, “a student of the world. What is it in a woman that seems to mark her down your legitimate sport? Have I these unconscious attributes? Tell me, only in your own excuse.”
“I have said once before, Madam, that you are an angel.”
“Then do angels beck, like wantons, at the street corners? I am no angel, Monsieur, and your assurance proves you know it—claims me, through my own act, to be the butt of your scorn and mockery.”
“If you could see into my heart—”
“It professed to speak once of loyalty to a friend. Hold by your plausible surface, Monsieur. I would not stir those depths, if I were you.”
“Then, Madam, would you leave truth to perish in the mud. My heart is foul, maybe, but there is that to redeem it at the bottom.”
She stirred a little, turning on him.
“Truth, sir! Has it lain buried there since that time when for once it rose to foretell an outrage, which—O, Monsieur! I have not forgotten your words—your last, when you parted from me on—O, indeed, it is possible to accommodate a prophecy—to verify through a confederate a villainy which one has foreshadowed—my God! if that is Truth!”
He went as white as stone; he looked as petrified.