“I mean to your person.”
“Oh, yes,” she murmured, glanced down, as it were upon herself, then added very low: “This body.”
“Well, it is you,” said Blunt with visibly contained irritation. “You don’t pretend it’s somebody else’s. It can’t be. You haven’t borrowed it. . . . It fits you too well,” he ended between his teeth.
“You take pleasure in tormenting yourself,” she remonstrated, suddenly placated; “and I would be sorry for you if I didn’t think it’s the mere revolt of your pride. And you know you are indulging your pride at my expense. As to the rest of it, as to my living, acting, working wonders at a little cost. . . . it has all but killed me morally. Do you hear? Killed.”
“Oh, you are not dead yet,” he muttered,
“No,” she said with gentle patience. “There is still some feeling left in me; and if it is any satisfaction to you to know it, you may be certain that I shall be conscious of the last stab.”
He remained silent for a while and then with a polite smile and a movement of the head in my direction he warned her.
“Our audience will get bored.”
“I am perfectly aware that Monsieur George is here, and that he has been breathing a very different atmosphere from what he gets in this room. Don’t you find this room extremely confined?” she asked me.
The room was very large but it is a fact that I felt oppressed at that moment. This mysterious quarrel between those two people, revealing something more close in their intercourse than I had ever before suspected, made me so profoundly unhappy that I didn’t even attempt to answer. And she continued: