“I have only contempt for a woman who tries to hold a man when he wishes to go,” said Anita, with quiet but energetic bitterness. “Besides”—she hesitated an instant before going on—“Gladys deserves her fate. She doesn't really care for him. She's only jealous of him. She never did love him.”
“How do you know?” said I sharply, trying to persuade myself it was not an ugly suspicion in me that lifted its head and shot out that question.
“Because he never loved her,” she replied. “The feeling a woman has for a man or a man for a woman, without any response, isn't love, isn't worthy the name of love. It's a sort of baffled covetousness. Love means generosity, not greediness.” Then—“Why do you not ask me whether what she said is true?”
The change in her tone with that last sentence, the strange, ominous note in it, startled me,
“Because,” replied I, “as I said to her, to ask my wife such a question would be to insult her. If you were riding with him, it was an accident.” As if my rude repulse of her overtures and my keeping away from her ever since would not have justified her in almost anything.
She flushed the dark red of shame, but her gaze held steady and unflinching upon mine. “It was not altogether by accident,” she said. And I think she expected me to kill her.
When a man admits and respects a woman's rights where he is himself concerned, he either is no longer interested in her or has begun to love her so well that he can control the savage and selfish instincts of passion. If Mowbray Langdon had been there, I might have killed them both; but he was not there, and she, facing me without fear, was not the woman to be suspected of the stealthy and traitorous.
“It was he that you meant when you warned me you cared for another man?” said I, so quietly that I wondered at myself; wondered what had become of the “Black Matt” who had used his fists almost as much as his brains in fighting his way up.
“Yes,” she said, her head down now.
A long pause.