"Why not ask him to let ME alone—to give MY better nature a chance?"
"You—laughing at me in these circumstances! You who pretended to be a man, pretended to love Pauline Gardiner——"
He started and his eyes blazed, as if she had cut him across the face with a whip. Then he drew himself up with an expression of insolent fury. His lips, his sharp white teeth, were cruel.
She bore his look without flinching.
"Yes," she went on, "you think you love her. Yet you act as if her love were a degrading influence in your life, as if she were a bad woman instead of one who ought to inspire a man to do and be his best. How ashamed she'd be of you, of your love, if she could see you as you are now—the tempter of all the bad impulses in this college."
He could not trust himself to reply. He was suffocating with rage and shame. He lifted his hat, walked rapidly away from her and went home. Pierson had never seen him in an ugly mood before. And he, too, was in an ugly mood—disgusted with his own conduct, angry at Scarborough, whom he held responsible for the unprecedented excesses of this last trip to Chicago and for their consequences.
"What's happened?" he asked sourly. "What's the matter with YOU?"
"Your Olivia," replied Scarborough, with a vicious sneer, "has been insulting me for your sins. She is a shrew! I don't wonder you dropped her."
Pierson rose slowly and faced him.
"You astonish me," he said. "I shouldn't have believed you capable of a speech which no gentleman could possibly utter."