“You say let us be reasonable,” I went on. “Well, let us be reasonable. There may come a time when woman can be free and independent, but that time is a long way off yet. The world is organized on the basis of every woman's having a protector—of every decent woman's having a husband, unless she remains in the home of some of her blood-relations. There may be women strong enough to set the world at defiance. But you are not one of them—and you know it. You have shown it to yourself again and again in the last forty-eight hours. Your bringing-up has kept you a child in real knowledge of real life, as distinguished from the life in that fashionable hothouse. If you tried to assert your so-called independence, you would be the easy prey of a scoundrel or scoundrels. When I, who have lived in the thick of the fight all my life, who have learned by many a surprise and defeat never to sleep except with the sword and gun in hand, and one eye open—when I have been trapped as Roebuck and Langdon have just trapped me—what chance would a woman like you have?”
She did not answer or change expression.
“Is what I say reasonable or unreasonable?” I asked gently.
“Reasonable—from your standpoint,” she said.
She gazed out into the moonlight, up into the sky. And at the look in her face, the primeval savage in me strained to close round that slender white throat of hers and crush and crush until it had killed in her the thought of that other man which was transforming her from marble to flesh that glowed and blood that surged. I pushed back my chair with a sudden noise; by the way she trembled I gaged how tense her nerves must be. I rose and, in a fairly calm tone, said: “We understand each other?”
“Yes,” she answered. “As before.”
I ignored this. “Think it over, Anita,” I urged—she seemed to me so like a sweet, spoiled child again. I longed to go straight at her about that other man. I stood for a moment with Tom Langdon's name on my lips, but I could not trust myself. I went away to my own rooms.
I thrust thoughts of her from my mind. I spent the night gnawing upon the ropes with which Mowbray Langdon and Roebuck had bound me, hand and foot. I now saw they were ropes of steel—and it had long been broad day before I found that weak strand which is in every rope of human make.