"Magnanimity or murder! I suppose so. Let it be magnanimity, Rose. I have never done you anything but good since I first met your face, now twenty years ago. You were but sixteen then. You are thirty-six now, and, by Jove! handsomer than ever."
"Thank you; I quite well know that I am. My looking glass, that never flatters, tells me so."
"Then why, in the name of common sense, can you not be happy? Look you, Rose, you have no cause to complain of me. When even in your childhood, you—"
"How dare you throw that up to me!" she exclaimed.
He went on as if he had not heard her.
"Were utterly lost and ruined through the villainy of your first lover—what did I do? I took you up, got a place for you in my father's house as the governess of my niece."
"Well, I worked for my living there, did I not? I gave a fair day's work for a fair day's wages, as your stony old father would say."
"Certainly, you did. But you would not have had an opportunity of doing so in any honest way if it had not been for me."
"How dare you hit me in the teeth with that!"
"Only in self-defense, my Rose."