“Look here,” he protested. “That would be impossible! You’re misinformed.”
“I wish I were,” she returned. “Unfortunately, it is a matter of direct knowledge. You caused Vedder Court to be torn down because I thought it should be wiped out of existence, and in the process you cheated Market Square Church out of six million dollars!”
He could not have been more shocked if she had struck him.
“I knew you did not understand,” he kindly reproved her. “I didn’t want those old buildings. They couldn’t have sold them for the wreckage price. When you suggested that they should be torn down, I saw it. They were a public menace, and the public was right with the movement. The condemnation price will cover all they could get from the property from any source. You see, you don’t understand business,” and his tone was forgiving. “I’d have been foolish to pay six million dollars for something I couldn’t use. You know, Gail, when the building commissioners came to look over those buildings, they were shocked! Some of them wouldn’t have stood up another year. It was only the political influence of Clark and Chisholm and a few of the other big guns of the congregation, which kept them from being condemned long ago. You shouldn’t interfere in business. It always creates trouble between man and wife,” and he advanced to put his arm around her, and soothe her.
The hand with which she warded him off was effective this time. She stared at him in wonder. It seemed inconceivable that the moral sense of any intelligent man should be so blunted.
“There’s another reason,” she told him, despairing of making him realise that he had done anything out of the way. “I do not love you. I could not.”
For just a moment he was checked; then his jaws set.
“That is something you must learn. You have young notions of love, gleaned from poetry and fiction. You conceive it to be an ideal stage of existence, a mysterious something almost too delicate for perception by the human senses. I will teach you love, Gail! Look,” and he stretched up his firm arm, as if in his grip he already held the reins of the mighty empire he was hewing out for her. “Love is a thing of strength, of power, of desire which shakes, and burns, and consumes with fever! It is like the lust to kill! It whips, and it goads, and it drives! It creates! It puts new images into the brain; it puts new strength into sinews; it puts new life into the blood! It cries out! It demands! It has caused me to turn back from middle-age to youth, to renew all my ambitions, a thousandfold enhanced by my maturity! It has caused me to grapple the world by the throat, and shake it, throttle it; so that I might drag it, quivering, to your feet and say, this is yours; kick it! That is love, Gail! It drives one on to do great deeds! It gives one the impulse to recognise no bounds, no bars, no obstacles! It has put all my being into the attainment of things big enough to show you the force of my will, and what it could conquer! Do you suppose that, with such love driving me on, any objection which you may make will stop me? No! I set out to attain you as the summit of my desire, the one thing in this world I want, and will have!”
Again that great fear of him possessed Gail. She feared many things. She feared that, in spite of her determination, he would still have her, and in that possibility alone lay all the other fears, fears so gruesome that she did not dare see them clearly! She knew that she must retain absolute control of herself.
“I shall not discuss the matter any further,” she quietly said, and walking straight towards the door, passed by him, quite within the reach of his arm, without either looking at him or away from him. Something within his own strength respected hers, in spite of him. “I have said all that I have to say.”