“Crocodile tears! You never even cried like a decent woman, from your heart, because you haven’t got a heart.”
“Don’t say that,” she said. “Your heart can’t break if you haven’t got one, and mine’s broken all right now. With all my dreadful faults, I’m human—only too much so. I know what I’ve done, and what I’ve lost.”
“And what you’ve won, too—a lunatic, that will very likely end on the gallows as a traitor to the country, or some such thing.”
“No, he won’t,” she replied. “He’s too dull for that.”
“You can call him dull, can you?”
“You’ve no right to make me talk about him,” answered she; “all the same, honesty’s no crime, and I say he’s a dull man, because anybody with only one idea is dull.”
“Yes, no doubt; if you’re not his one idea yourself, you find him dull. And when you were my only idea, you still wanted more—always wanted more—more than you had of everything but trouble; and now you’ve brewed that for yourself. And what d’you mean, when you say you’ve ruined his life as well as mine?”
Medora enjoyed the lash of his scornful voice.
“You’ll kill me if you speak so harsh,” she said. “I meant—I meant—I don’t know what I meant. Only it’s clear to me that I shan’t make him the wife he thinks I shall.”
“That’s true for once. You’re no wife for any man. And as for him, he don’t want a flesh and blood woman for his partner, and if you hadn’t thrown yourself at his head, like a street-walker, he’d never have taken you. The shamelessness—the plotting—the lies. When you grasp hold of what you’ve done, you ought to want to drown yourself.”