“I tell you, you’re utterly and entirely mistaken!” cried Crowdie, angrily. “You’re making a mountain out of a mole hill. You’re losing your temper over it, and working yourself into a passion, till you don’t know what’s true and what isn’t. It’s madness in you, and it isn’t fair to me. When have I ever looked at another woman—”
“It had to begin some time—so it’s begun now—in the worst way it could begin, with Katharine Lauderdale!”
“I hate Katharine Lauderdale—her and the sound of her name! How often must I say it before you’ll believe me?”
“Oh—saying it won’t make it true! Do you think I didn’t see your face—just now?”
“I don’t know what you thought you saw—but I know what there was to be seen, and if you weren’t beside yourself with jealousy you wouldn’t have thought twice about it. I never knew what jealousy meant before—”
“And you don’t now. I’m not jealous of her—I hate her. I despise her for trying to steal you from me, but since she’s got you—since you love her so that you’ll lie for her, and be a coward for her, and be angry for her—just as it suits you—oh no, indeed! I’m not jealous of Katharine. That’s quite another thing. Jealous! And you reproach me, and cast it in my teeth, because I say I hate her, when she’s taken everything I cared for in this earth, everything I had! Ah—I could kill her! But I’m not jealous. One must care for oneself to be jealous; one must be wounded, hurt, insulted, to be jealous! Do you think I want you, if you don’t want me? How little you’ve ever understood me!”
She drew herself up, leaning back against the shelf of the mantelpiece, and her lips curled scornfully, though they trembled a little, and she fixed her eyes upon his face with a strange, frightened fierceness, like that of a delicate wild animal driven to bay, but determined to resist. Crowdie met her glance steadily now, leaning with both hands upon the back of the chair between them and bending his body a little, in the attitude of a man who means to speak very earnestly.
“I don’t think any one could understand you now,” he began, in a quiet, but determined tone. “I can’t, I confess. But I know you’re not yourself, and you don’t know what you’re saying. I’m not going to argue as to whether you’re jealous of Katharine Lauderdale, or not. It’s too absurd! You’ve no right to be, at all events—”
“No right!” cried Hester, with a half hysterical laugh. “If ever a woman had a right to be jealous of another—”
“No, you’ve not—not the shadow of a right. You know how I’ve loved you for years—well—you know how, and what sort of love there’s been between us. You’re mad to think that anything I’ve done—”