Her eyes flashed, her bosom heaved. "WHY do I take these things from you? WHY do I invite them?"
"Because you inherit your father's magnificent persistence—and you've set your heart on the whim of making a fool of me—and you hate to give up."
"You wrong me—indeed you do," cried she. "I want to learn—I want to be of use in the world. I want to have some kind of a real life."
"Really?" mocked he good-humoredly.
"Really," said she with all her power of sweet earnestness.
"Then—cut your nails and go to work. And when you have become a genuine laborer, you'll begin to try to improve not the condition of others, but your own. The way to help workers is to abolish the idlers who hang like a millstone about their necks. You can help only by abolishing the one idler under your control."
She stood nearer him, very near him. She threw out her lovely arms in a gesture of humility. "I will do whatever you say," she said.
They looked each into the other's eyes. The color fled from her face, the blood poured into his—wave upon wave, until he was like a man who has been set on fire by the furious heat of long years of equatorial sun. He muttered, wheeled about and strode away—in resolute and relentless flight. She dropped down where he had been sitting and hid her face in her perfumed hands.
"I care for him," she moaned, "and he saw and he despises me! How COULD I—how COULD I!"
Nevertheless, within a quarter of an hour she was in her dressing room, standing at the table, eyes carefully avoiding her mirrored eyes—as she cut her finger nails.