"Probably I should have less if I strove only for the happiness of others," she insisted.
"There are people like that," he assented; "perhaps you are one of them; so you might as well go on striving for happiness in your own way. Of course you won't get it, but you will at least have the pleasures of anticipation, and that is something."
"I think I know myself and my own affairs well enough to determine for myself how to conduct my life," she said with a note of asperity in her voice.
Tarzan shrugged. "It was not in my thoughts to interfere," he said. "If you are determined to kill me and are quite sure that you will derive pleasure from it, why, I should be the last in the world to suggest that you abandon the idea."
"You do not amuse me," said Nemone haughtily; "I do not care for irony that is aimed at myself." She turned fiercely on him. "Men have died for less!" she cried, and the lord of the jungle laughed in her face.
"How many times?" he asked.
"A moment ago," said Nemone, "I was beginning to regret the thing that is about to happen. Had you been different, had you sought to conciliate me, I might have relented and returned you to favor; but you do everything to antagonize me. You affront me, you insult me, you laugh at me." Her voice was rising, a barometric indication, Tarzan had learned, of her mental state.
"And yet, Nemone, I am drawn to you," admitted the ape-man. "I cannot understand it. You are attracted to me in spite of wounded pride and lacerated dignity; and I to you though I hold in contempt your principles, your ideals, and your methods. It is strange, isn't it?"
The woman nodded. "It is strange," she mused. "I never loved one as I loved you, and yet I am going to kill you notwithstanding the fact that I still love you."
"And you will go on killing people and being unhappy until it is your turn to be killed," he said sadly.