“An injury to your dignity, to your womanhood and sensibility——”
“Hardly,” she said scornfully, “or even to my pride. It was only my body—you hurt, Mr. Gallatin—your kisses—they soiled me——”
“My God, Jane! Don’t! Haven’t you punished me enough? I was mad, I tell you. There was a devil in me, that owned me body and soul, that stole my reason, killed what was good, and made a monster of the love I had cherished—an insensate enemy that perverted and brutalized every decent instinct, a Thing unfamiliar to you which frightened and drove you away in fear and loathing. It was not me you feared, Jane, for you trusted me. It was the Thing you feared, as I fear it, the Enemy that had pursued me into the woods where I had fled from it.”
Jane Loring sat in her corner apparently unconcerned, but her heart was throbbing and the hands beneath the wide sleeves of her opera kimono were nervously clutched. The sound of his voice, its deep sonorous tones when aroused were familiar to her. As he paused she stole a glance at him, for as he spoke of his Enemy he had turned away from her, his eyes peering out into the dimly lighted street, as if the mention of his weakness shamed him.
“I’m not asking you for your pity,” he went on more steadily. “I only want your pardon. I don’t think it’s too much to ask. It wasn’t the real Phil Gallatin who brought that shame on you.”
“The real Phil Gallatin! Which is the real Phil Gallatin?” she asked cruelly.
“What you make him—to-night,” he replied quickly. “I’ve done what I can without you—lived like an outcast on the memories of happiness, but I can’t subsist on that. Memory is poor food for a starving man.”
“I can’t see how I can be held accountable. I did not make you, Mr. Gallatin.”
“But you can mar me. I’ve come,” he remembered the words of Mrs. Pennington, “I’ve come to the parting of the ways. Up there—I gained my self-respect—and lost it. The best of me you saw and the worst of me. You knew me only for five days and yet no one in the world can know me exactly as you do.”
“The pity of it——”