"Why shouldn't he have provided me with money when I asked it?" she demanded, at last.
The new quality of her speech brought his head up with a jerk. Instead of colourless harshness, it had a warm fury. It was not that she spoke loudly or on a high key; but it had an unbridled, self-indulgent sound. He got the impression that she put off all censorship from either her feeling or her expression.
"That wasn't much to ask—as long as he continued his life of ease, of luxury, of safety—as long as I left out of consideration the debt he couldn't pay, the debt that was impossible of payment."
Alien as the thing seemed in connection with her, he grasped it. She thought that she had once loved the man.
"The matter of personal feeling?" he asked.
"Yes. When he left Pursuit, he destroyed the better part of me—what you would call the good part."
She said that without sentimentalism, without making it a plea for sympathy; she had better sense, he saw, than to imagine that she could arouse sympathy on that ground.
"And," she continued, with intense malignity, "what was so monstrous in my asking him for money? I asked him for no payment of what he really owes me. That's a debt he can't pay! My beauty, destroyed, withered and covered over with the hard mask of the features you see now; my capacity for happiness, dead, swallowed up in my long, long devotion to my purpose to find him again—those things, man as you are, you realize are beyond the scope of payment or repayment!"
Without rising to a standing position, she leaned so far forward that her weight was all on her feet, and, although her figure retained the posture of one seated on a chair, she was in fact independent of support from it, and held herself crouching in front of him, taut, a tremor in her limbs because of the strain.