He snapped his fingers in her face. “Bah! Your imperious airs do not fool me. I know something of the blue blood now. It is like any other—has the same passions and gratifies them in the same way. As a noblewoman you ought at least to have the courage of your vices.”
She started for the door, but stopped suddenly and faced him again. “Say what you mean in direct words or I shall go.”
“Oh, I will be plain!” he flung back, going close to her. “The man by whom you pretend to be inspired so grandly is simply one who provokes your appetite more than I do. You have never given him up. He cannot come to you. That would destroy the pretty illusion of virtue; so you go to him. To this end you employ a shrewd subterfuge. Suddenly you are seized with a fever of pity for the poor of Milan. You have a burning desire to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked. You select the Porta Ticinese quarter for your field of labour, although the same conditions prevail not a stone’s throw from this spot,” and he pointed towards the roofs that showed above the garden wall.
She had turned her back to him. “Why do you go to the Porta Ticinese?” he went on. “You wish plain speech. I answer, then, because Mario Forza is to be found there in his Co-operative Society offices. He, too—snivelling demagogue!—loves the poor. That you may go to him, whom you love, you come to me, whom you choose to despise, for money!—that you may carry on your intrigue under the cloak of charity! I was blind before, signora, but now——”
“Stop!” she commanded him, wheeling suddenly. “What you say is false, madly, monstrously false!” She rose before him a queenly young figure, erect and tall. Had it been given to Tarsis to know he would have perceived in that moment, as he looked upon her, that his anger had driven him to a terrible misjudgment. The poise of her head, the intrepid, direct message of her eyes, her bearing, so superior to vulgar graces—these were her clear ensigns of a disdain profound for the mean, the low, the perfidious; but to all this Tarsis was blind, as an enraged bull is blind to the glories of the sunset. She turned from him and moved once more toward the door to the passage that led to her private apartments; but still the impassioned voice of Tarsis was at her ear.
“Oh, don’t play the grand nobility with me”; he muttered. “I have been too easy with you, too eager to serve, to please you. I have been weak—I, who was never weak before. But that is past. I don’t care what you do. Henceforth I shall be strong. Do you hear? I know my rights. In Sicily we have a way of spoiling such games as you have been playing.”
Hera kept moving toward the door, but always she felt his breath panting beside her. At the threshold she turned and paused long enough to say, her voice issuing without a tremor:
“I repeat that what you have said is false, absolutely false!”
Then she went her way down the corridor.