“You inconsistent creature!” she said. “Why not mine?”
“I’ll take my soul with me, such as it is,” he answered. “I’ll not make away with it while my feet are on the earth.”
“Do you know that you are really a very extraordinary person?” she said.
“What I am you are responsible for,” he answered. “I was all right when you first knew me. I may have been ignorant, perhaps, but at any rate I was sincere. I had a conscience and an ideal. Oh! I suppose you found me very amusing—a missioner who thought it worth while to give a part of his life to help his fellows climb a few steps higher up. What devil was it that sent you stealing down the lane that night from your house, I wonder?”
She nodded slowly.
“I’m sorry you can speak of it like that,” she said. “To me it was the most delightful piece of sentiment! Almost like a poem!”
“A poem! It was the Devil’s own poetry you breathed into me! What a poor mad fool I became! You saw how easily I gave my work up, how I sulked up to London, fighting with it all the time, with this madness—this——”
“Dear me,” she said, “what an Adam you are! My dear Victor, isn’t it—you are very, very young. There is no need for you to manufacture a huge tragedy out of a woman’s kiss.”
“What else is it but a tragedy,” he demanded, “the kiss that is a lie—or worse? You brought me here, you let me hold you in my arms, you filled my brain with mad thoughts, you drove everything good and worth having out of life, you filled it with what? Yourself! And then—you pat me on the cheek and tell me to come, and be kissed some other day, when you feel in the humour, a wet afternoon, perhaps, or when you are feeling bored, and want to hunt up a few new emotions! It may be the way with you and your kind. I call it hellish!”
“Well,” she said, “tell me exactly what it is that you want?”