"I don't believe it."
"You d-don't believe it? W-what do you know about it? Didn't she behave as though she did? Didn't she go about with me? Didn't she take things from me—no decent woman would have taken unless she loved me?"
"She doesn't happen to be a decent woman," Stonehouse observed. "To do her justice she doesn't pretend to be one."
Cosgrave advanced upon him as though he would have struck him across the face. But he stopped in time, not from remorse, but as though pulled up by a revelation of maddening absurdity.
"Oh, you—you! You don't understand. You aren't capable of understanding. You're a block—a machine—you don't feel—you g-go about—rolling over p-people and things like—like a damned steam-roller. You're not a man at all. You don't love anyone—not even yourself. What do you know about anything?"
He was grotesque in his scorn, and yet Stonehouse, leaning with an apparent negligence against the mantel-shelf, felt himself go dead white under the attack. He had lost Cosgrave. And he knew now that he needed him desperately—more now than even in his desolate childhood—that unconsciously he had hugged the knowledge of that boyish affection and dependence to him with a secret pride as a talisman against he hardly knew what—utter isolation, a terrifying hardness. He made up his mind to have done now with reserve, to show before it was too late at least some of that dwarfed and suffocated feeling. But he faltered over his first sentence. He had trained himself too long and too carefully to speak with that cold, ironic inflexion. He sounded in his own ears formal—unconvincing.
"You're wrong. I do care. I care for you. You're my friend. I do understand, in part, at any rate. I can prove it. When I saw how unhappy you were I went to her—I tried to reason with her."
He broke off altogether under the amazed stare that greeted this statement. The next instant Cosgrave had tossed his hands to heaven, shouting with a ribald laughter:
"Oh, my Heaven—you poor fish! You think you can cure everything. I can imagine what you said: 'I suggest, Mademoiselle, that you reduce the doses gradually.'"
It was so nearly what he had said that Stonehouse flinched, and suddenly Cosgrave seemed to feel an impatient compassion for him. "Oh, I'm a beast. It was jolly decent of you. You meant well. But you can't help."