“No; it is impossible,” she avowed, painfully.
“It is your plain obligation to do so,” he asserted, his manner harsh again. “What right have you to accept all that your husband bestows and give nothing in return?”
She answered him slowly, measuring every word: “The wrong I did you was in yielding to your solicitations—in allowing you to persuade me to marry you. I should have been stronger. For the rest, I am giving you all that I promised. Can you deny this?”
He did not answer the question. Instead, he swept her with a contemptuous glance. “I perceive that with all this pretty show of remorse,” he said, “you are determined to keep up your defiance of me.”
“Indeed, I am acting in no spirit of defiance,” she replied. “You must believe that. I tell you that, in the circumstances, I should deem myself on a plane with the women of the Galleria if I became to you what you wish.”
She turned again to the window, and his coarse laugh sounded in her ears.
“You would have me believe,” she heard him sneering, as he drew nearer to her, “that you are living up to some poetic ideal. At the outset I was fool enough to swallow that fiction. I thought that you were merely carrying idealism to the verge of absurdity, and at that point you would come to your senses and turn back. I credited my wife with being honest, you see.”
“Will you spare me these insinuations?” she said. “I beg of you to speak out.”
“Oh, your counterfeit of lofty virtue is skilful,” he went on, mocking her manner. “Though a little cheap at times, on the whole it would deceive a critic who did not know the truth. I happen to know the truth, signora.”
Now she faced him with flashing eyes. “Tell me what you mean!”