"I’m not!" she cried, pitifully. "I do understand! I’m not cold!"
"Compared to me you are. My love for you was madness. I couldn’t think of anything else. It wasn’t the gentle affection you felt."
"I didn’t feel a gentle affection!" she cried, in tears. "You couldn’t love me more than I love you!"
"Do you?" he asked, in a sort of stealthy triumph.
She didn’t see that. She was utterly sincere; and her beautiful sincerity, her tears, suddenly moved him to one of those tempests of remorse to which he was so prone.
"Oh, God!" he cried. "What a brute I am! I talk about giving you up, and all the time I’m watching your face for signs of love. How can I find the strength to let you go?"
"Don’t!" said Angelica, with streaming eyes. "Don’t let me go, Vincent darling! Oh, if only we have each other!"
"We can’t have each other. It’s a sin!" he said. "Don’t you see? Oh, Angelica! Beautiful Angelica! Why don’t you help me? Why do you try to draw me down, and ruin me, and destroy me?" He sprang up, his fine face distorted with grief and passion. "You don’t know!" he cried. "Oh, my God! I have sinned! I have sinned! You don’t know after what sufferings, what weary wanderings, I have come back to God! You cannot imagine! There is nothing I have not done; no infamy I have not committed!"
And then he began his awful catalogue. He told her of his sins, his vices—vile enough in reality, but exaggerated by his hysteria. He had no medium between ingenious self-excuse and the wildest self-accusation. He took a monstrous sort of joy in his horrible recital. He remembered incidents from his boyhood, of cruelty, bestiality, lust, drunkenness, theft, every sort of dishonour.
"I’ve been in prison," he said. "No one knows. They thought I was in Canada that year. I’ve stolen from my own wife and spent the money on vile women. I’ve been kicked out of disreputable hotels."