"When are you to be married?" she asked quietly.
"You are playing with me!" he cried. "You are tormenting me. What have I ever done that you should treat me this way?" He caught her unresisting hands and kissed them. "Dear—my dear—don't you care for me at all?"
"No," she said placidly. "I've always told you so."
He seized her in his arms, kissed her with a frenzy that was savage, ferocious. "You will drive me mad. You have driven me mad!" he muttered. And he added, unconscious that he was speaking his thoughts, so distracted was he: "You must love me—you must! No woman has ever resisted me. You cannot."
She drew herself away from him, stood before him like snow, like ice. "One thing I have never told you. I'll tell you now," she said deliberately. "I despise you."
He fell back a step and the chill of her coldness seemed to be freezing the blood in his veins.
"I've always despised you," she went on, and he shivered before that contemptuous word—it seemed only the more contemptuous for her calmness. "Sometimes I've despised you thoroughly—again only a little—but always that feeling."
For a moment he thought she had at last stung his pride into the semblance of haughtiness. He was able to look at her with mocking eyes and to say, "I congratulate you on your cleverness in concealing your feelings."
"It wasn't my cleverness," she said wearily. "It was your blindness. I never deceived you."
"No, you never have," he replied sincerely. "Perhaps I deserve to be despised. Again, perhaps if you knew the world—the one I live in—better, you'd think less harshly of me."