“You need to go to sleep and clear your head,” said she coolly.
“Look here now, tell me once, are you truthful?”
“Yes, I am full of truths of one kind and another: oppressively full. I should like to unload.”
“And yet you say you are a liar?”
“Oh, yes. Now let us go right over and over it again and again; it is only quarter past eleven,” said she, laughing at his eagerness.
“You call this a great joke, don’t you?” with passionate intensity.
“Perfectly convulsing,” she answered, with a look as if her patience was about gone, and as if, should he dare to browbeat her any longer with that look in his eyes, she would establish her claim to a new line of ability. This possibility was so evident on her countenance that he said:
“I believe if you can lie like this, you can do anything.”
“I seem to feel some undeveloped ability stirring within me myself,” said she; “nothing of course in the chewing, drinking, sweltering animalism line. But let us say some skillful, intellectual achievement, which might rid the world of a few thousands like yourself, and make room for a new race,” said she with a deliberate consideration that had in it the savoir-faire of a society woman, wrought up beyond much more endurance of the life she had been forced to lead,—a life now coming in sight of the convincing truths of this liberalizing age.
Poor Reginald stood actually aghast. His lower jaw had fallen and his eyes protruded, as, with his third finger pointed to his breast, he stammered: “Me! Rid the world of such as me? What have you against me?”