She did not move.
"Do you perchance imagine that a starved and badly treated body can ever harbour that most precious gift of the gods, a clear, sane mind?"
She did not move.
He looked at her in silence for a moment, then put down the glass. "This is all my fault," he said slowly. "The whole responsibility for this unhappiness is on my shoulders, and I frankly confess it is a burden so grievous that I know not how to bear it."
He paused, but she took no notice.
"Ma'am, I have loved you."
She took no notice.
"And the property of love, I have observed, is often to mangle and kill the soul of its object."
She might have been asleep.
"Ma'am, I have brought you to a sorry pass. I was old, and you were young. I experienced, you ignorant. I deliberate, you impulsive. I a man, you a woman. Instead of restraining you, guiding you, shielding you from yourself, I was most vile, and fired you with desires for freedom that under the peculiar circumstances were wicked, set a ball rolling that I might have foreseen could never afterwards be stopped, put thoughts into your head that never without me would have entered it, embarked you on an enterprise in which the happiness of your whole life was doomed to shipwreck."