He knew that she meant it. "You'd break every bone in your body," he said.
"That would be better than having your hands on me again."
He made a spring and caught her by the wrists. "Now jump!"
"Oh, very clever," she said, with superb sarcasm. "You've evidently made a hobby of fighting with women."
That stung Franklin. "I don't call you a woman," he blurted out. "There's been nothing of the woman in you since the day you knew enough words to order one of your nurses about. You're a hybrid, the production of a mixture of two species,—labor and wealth. The labor in you, inherited from the man who made your first millions, is tainted with revolt, the wealth with the damned despotism that creates it. You're no more a woman than this barrack is a home, or this absurd place a bedroom. You're a grotesque who has been brought up in a nightmare. You walk on a world that is too small for your feet. You're out of drawing like a woman in a fashion-plate. You're a sort of female Gulliver on an earth peopled with pigmies. You almost believe that you're Almighty and that when you raise your finger life must be reset like a chess-board. And you're perfectly right. It can and is and will be so long as money counts. I know it and do it, for you and I hold a piece each of the same wand. But you're up against me now, and you've used me as you might have used a trained servant, or an eager parasite, ready and willing to lick the blacking off your boots for the sake of what may fall unnoticed from your purse, and, by God, you're not going to get away with it."
He controlled her across to the door of the maid's room and pushed it open with his foot. "Come out," he said, "and get Mrs. Franklin ready for the night." Then he marched Beatrix to and into the dressing-room, followed by Helene. Reflected in the mirrors there were not three, but thirty people. "I'll give you fifteen minutes," he continued, "and for the sake of all concerned don't be longer. Is that agreed?"
Beatrix met his eyes. Her spirit was unbroken, her chin at the same tilt, her attitude not one whit less contemptuously assured, but he saw in the slight inclination of her golden head the acknowledgment that he held all the cards.
He turned on his heel and left the room, went over to an open window and drew in long breaths of air.
He and she, children of the same nightmare, as he had called it, had both used the word vanity about the thing which impelled him to punish. But as he looked out into the sane night, magic only from the moon's touch, it came to him that to dismiss it as vanity was to slur over the true meaning of that before which he was urged. It was the labor in him, the revolt against the despotism of wealth that had come back again in his fight with his fellow-hybrid, and once more labor was top-dog. How would he use his power?
For fifteen minutes he stood there with his heart thumping, his hands hot, the exhilaration of success running through his blood like alcohol. And then, to the second, came the sweet diaphanous figure, which, with the dignity of a brave but conquered enemy, crossed to the foolish bed.