"As a conquest, Mr. Thrall, I am scarcely worthy of your skill, and yet my being a 'society débutante' may add a slight fillip of novelty to the old, old story of ruined girlhood—such trifles help, no doubt, to keep up an actor's popularity!"
"You are very cruel!" he groaned.
"I?" she cried, accusingly, "I am cruel?"
"Yes; it is cruel to take pleasure in another's pain, but—" He closed his eyes an instant, and then went on very patiently. "I may not ask you for mercy. Being guilty, it is right I should suffer!"
"Suffer?" she repeated, unbelievingly. "You? Why should you suffer, pray? You have hung a millstone about my neck for life! But you go lightly enough along the conqueror's path! You suffer—from what? You have done nothing to unfit you for your world! You will be feasted and banqueted as usual; you are quite secure with your fashionable clientèle of women, who will applaud you rapturously, while looking upon me as forever defiled!" Then, rather wildly, she added: "You said the crown you promised me was pasteboard, but you did not tell me it was wreathed inside with thorns! Oh, why have you betrayed my adoring faith in you! What have I ever done to harm you? Why—why in God's great name—why have you so deceived me?"
Slowly he answered: "I thought you——"
"Do not dare!" gasped Sybil, "do not dare add a last infamous insult to cruel injury by telling me you thought I knew you were married!"
"At first," he persisted, "I supposed you knew; then when I found you did not, I—I—was in the grasp of a merciless passion. Dear, I could not speak! I could not, I tell you! Sybil! beloved! I would step between you and death without the flicker of an eyelash! I would give my life's blood for you as freely as a cup of water! Yet, I—who would gladly defend you from a world, was not strong enough to defend you from myself—from the love that possessed me utterly—at whose fire I relit ambition—romance—the desire for high achievement! You believe me guilty of a mere base passion; you are wrong! Doubtless there are men in the world who, loving even as I loved you, could have held their feelings well in leash, sealed their lips for honor's sake, but that power would come from long training and much practice in self-denial—not from one sporadic effort of self-control! And I, oh, child, flattered by the world—vain, egotistical, and spoiled—when had I acquired strength through patient endurance or through temptations resisted? I was incapable of self-abnegation; I, who had denied myself nothing all my life long, could not begin by denying my desperate love the possession that it longed for! For men are like that, dear, in spite of your contemptuous unbelief. Be they good or be they bad, be they ever so reverently true, their senses will demand possession of the beloved. And I was so desolate—so lonely! There was not even friendship within the whited sepulchre of my domestic life."
The girl shrank. "Don't!" she cried, "don't add to cruelty and cowardice—treachery to her! She is very cruel, but then a good wife who suspects a wrong to her love has a right to be cruel!"
"Oh, you innocent, just soul!" the man cried. "Yes, she is cruel in very deed, since being a wife in name alone these years past she yet clings tenaciously to that empty title. She has not enough womanly pride to free the man who earnestly pleads to be released, whose chill indifference protects her from temptation. She is technically a loyal wife, but practically a foe—a sort of satiric keeper of the records of my life. 'A wrong to her love,' you said. You generous child, she does not know what love means, but she does know her legal rights; and to my agony will maintain them to the last, since the shibboleth of her life is: 'What will the world say?' Yes, she is very cruel!"