Then she withdrew her hand slowly and sat staring at it with an air of looking at some object unfamiliar to her. “I can’t marry you,” she said slowly. “I can’t.... I can’t.... There is nothing to be done.... There is nothing to be done.” And she began to cry silently, so that the tears fell down upon her hands.
The speech appeared to astonish him, for he made no effort to regain her hand but sat staring at her as at a stranger. When at last he spoke it was in a voice that was low and caressing, but the tenderness had slipped away and in its place there was a hardness, as of steel; it was like a sudden glimpse of claws emerging from a soft and furry paw.
“Is it because you won’t give him up,” he asked, “as you told my mother?”
“It is because I cannot give him up.... I cannot treat him that way.... I cannot ... cannot.”
The steel in the voice emerged a little more sharply. There was an edge to it now, sarcastic, cutting. “Is it because he is so fine ... so handsome ... so magnificent ... so dazzling?”
He repeated thus all the things that Clarence was not, and so he gave her the last bit of strength that she required, for the sound of his voice, the sharp edge of the sarcasm, filled her with a sudden anger and a wild desire to protect Clarence as something which was her own. She found herself fighting for a man who was none of these things against a man who to her was all of them. It struck somehow at her sense of gallantry ... that Callendar who had everything should sneer at poor Clarence who had nothing.
She said, “It has nothing to do with that.... There are some things that one cannot do.... This I will not do.” She dried her eyes and sat more erectly. “There is no use.... There was no use in your coming here.... My mind was made up ... long before you came.”
At this he turned angry. “You are like all your women.... Love to you is nothing.... It is something to be controlled. You don’t know what love is.... You would exploit it.... You are like all your women.”
So he talked thus for a time in a childish vein strange and new while she sat impassive, conscious all the while of the power he could exert over her, a power that had to do with the beauty of his hands, with the strange quality of his eyes, with the sound of his voice, with the soft catlike way in which he moved; yet she remained in some mysterious way safe from that power. It was, perhaps, her intelligence which saved her, for as she watched him she gained slowly a curious intuition of what he might do to her if she yielded. The old sense of conflict was fanned into a new life, more intense than it had ever been. He sought to overpower her will. She knew all at once that this was the very essence of his confused, unreasonable emotion.
And as she listened to him her woman’s instinct for the dramatic came to her aid. She saw herself sitting there calm and a little cold, slowly but surely winning in the battle. She listened to his abuse. It did not enrage her. It did not even make her weep. It seemed rather to increase her coldness, her very strength. She felt him beating against the wall of her serenity and a kind of fierce triumph flowed through her body. For a time she possessed truly a great magnificence. At a little distance, she stood outside herself and watched the spectacle. She saw him standing by her, white with anger.