"Laurence," she said, "do you think if one should do that every day, every day, and give one's self no rest, that after a while it would kill one?"
He regarded her fixedly for an instant.
"Do you want to die?" he asked, at last.
She sat perfectly still, and something terribly like, and yet terribly unlike, a smile crept slowly into her eyes as they met his. Then she replied, without flinching in the least, or moving her gaze:
"No."
He held up a long, slender forefinger, and shook it at her, slowly, in his favorite gesture of warning.
"No," he said, "you don't; but, even if you fancied you did, don't flatter yourself that it would happen. Shall I tell you what would occur? You would simply break down. You would lose your self-control and do things you did not wish to do; you would find it a physical impossibility to be equal to the occasion, and you would end by being pale and haggard—haggard, and discovering that your gowns were not becoming to you. How does the thing strike you?"
"It is very brutal," she said, with a little shudder; "but it is true."
"When you make ten remarks that are true," he returned, "nine of them are brutal. That is the charm of life."
"I don't think," she said, with inconsequent resentment, "that you very much mind being brutal to me."