Now it happened that Mr. Hethbridge had spoken of Wynderton at breakfast that morning in terms which left no doubt as to the untruth of the statement just made in regard to him. But even this would have been passed over by the woman who had a natural tendency towards falsehood herself, had not Seymour Michael made a hideous mistake. A wiser man than any of us has said that there is a time for all things. Most distinctly defined is the time for making love. More men come to grief by making too much love than too little. Seymour Michael, being heartless, deemed erroneously that this was a propitious moment to essay the power which had once been his over this woman.
He accompanied his reproachful speech with a tender glance, which in olden times had never failed to call forth an answering look of love in her eyes. Now, it suddenly aroused her to realise the extent of her hatred. In some subtle way it humiliated her; for she looked back into the past, and saw herself therein a dupe to this man.
“No!” she cried, and her raised voice had a sudden twang in it—suggestive of the streets; of the People. “No—you needn't trouble to make soft eyes at me. I know you now—I know that what that man said was true. He called you a coward and a cad. You are worse! You are a Jew—a mean, lying Jew.”
There are few greater trials to a man's dignity than vituperation from the lips of a woman. She walked towards him, clumsily, menacingly and raised her hand as if to strike him.
Seymour Michael's brown face turned yellow beneath her blazing anger.
“Sit down!” he commanded, “and don't make a fool of yourself.”
He was mean enough to pay her back in her own coin—the paltry, loud-ringing coin which is all that a woman has.
“I do not mean to wrangle,” he said coolly; “but I may as well tell you now that I never cared a jot for you. I was laughing at you in my sleeve all the time. I did not want you but your money. I concluded that the money would be too dear at the price, so I determined to throw you over. The way I chose to do it was as good as any other, because it saved me the trouble of writing to you.”
Anna Agar had obeyed him. She was sitting down in a stiff-backed arm-chair, looking stupidly at the pattern of the carpet as if it were something new to her. Between physical pain and mental excitement she was beginning to wander. She was the sort of woman to lose control over her mind with a temperature of one hundred and one.
Michael looked keenly at her. He had a racial terror of physical ailment. He saw that something was wrong, but his knowledge went no further. He had never seen a woman faint, so limited had been his experience of the sex.