Dacier threw his hands up and broke away. He had an impulse to dash from the room, to get a breath of different air. He stood at the window, observing tradesmen's carts, housemaids, blank doors, dogs, a beggar fifer. Her last words recurred to him. He turned: 'You were in extremity, you said. What is the meaning of that? What extremity?'
Her large dark eyes flashed powerlessly; her shape appeared to have narrowed; her tongue, too, was a feeble penitent.
'You ask a creature to recall her acts of insanity.'
'There must be some signification in your words, I suppose.'
'I will tell you as clearly as I can. You have the right to be my judge. I was in extremity—that is, I saw no means . . . I could not write: it was ruin coming.'
'Ah?—you took payment for playing spy?'
'I fancied I could retrieve . . . Now I see the folly, the baseness.
I was blind.'
'Then you sold me to a journalist for money?'
The intolerable scourge fetched a stifled scream from her and drove her pacing, but there was no escape; she returned to meet it.
The room was a cage to both of them, and every word of either was a sting.