His whole face lit up again—there was hope perhaps after all.
"Of course, darling—What else?"
"It is an insult—but I am not concerned with that point. My views are perhaps not orthodox. I am merely interested in my side of the affair, which is that I have not the slightest wish for the post. I will be no man's mistress—do you hear?"
"Katherine, can I not make you love me, sweet?"
She laughed softly. It was a dangerous sound, ominous as that which a lioness might make when she purrs.
"Not if you stayed on your knees for a thousand years! I have loved one man in my life with the kind of love which you desire—I know exactly what it means, and probably I shall never love another in that way—I sacrificed him for my idea. I had will enough to leave him, feeling for him what perhaps you feel for me. So do you think, then, that you could move me in the least!—You whom I do not love, but—despise!"
All this time, she stood there utterly desirable in her thin raiment, which she had never sought to cover. Indeed, now that she saw that she was going to win the game, she took joy that he should understand what he had lost, so that his punishment should be the more complete: there was nothing pitiful or tender about Katherine Bush. Her strange, strong character had no mercy for a man who had shown her that he was not master of himself—above all things, she admired self-control.
Gerard Strobridge suffered, as she spoke, as perhaps he had never done in his life before. If he had been one whit less of a gentleman, he would not now have conquered himself; he would have seized her in his arms, and made her pay for her scalding words. The effect of tradition for centuries, however, held him even beyond the mad longing which again thrilled through his blood as he looked at her.
He flung himself into the armchair and buried his head in his hands.