“I have no use for that kind of love,” he said coldly. “It is of no human value. To love the imaginary saint in a man is not going to help the man when you make the inevitable discovery that the saint isn’t there. If love is to be of any use it must be for the sinner as well.”
He went nearer to her, and laughed harshly when he observed how she drew back involuntarily from his advance.
“When you can bring yourself,” he said, “to suffer my touch without flinching; when you can feel glad for my lips to rest upon yours without consideration for where last they may have rested; when you can love me for myself—as I am—as you know me, a common adventurer, a profligate, then we may wipe out the intervening years... not before.”
She was silent for a while after he had finished; and he knew that she was considering what he had uttered with such brutal frankness, weighing it in her mind.
Presently she said, moistening her dry lips before speaking:
“Will you promise not to go to-morrow? ... to break with the old life finally?”
“Bargain for bargain,” he returned cynically. “You can’t give freely, you see.”
His face hardened, became more resolute.
“I can’t do what you ask... It is out of the question. I am pledged irrevocably—promised. I can’t draw back.”
She moved away with a gesture of bitterness, and with her back towards him, stood, a reluctant tragic figure, with one hand on the back of the chair where she had stood when he entered.