"You see!" She offered a despairing gesture to the stars. "It is not true what I say? I lay bare my heart to him, and he tells me that I act!"
"But my dear girl! surely you do not expect me to think otherwise?"
"I was a fool to expect anything from you," she returned bitterly--"you know too much about me. I cannot find it in my heart to blame you, since I am what I am, what the life you saved me to so long ago has made me. Why should you believe in me? Why should you credit the sincerity of this confession, which costs me so much humiliation? That would be too good for me, too much to ask of life!"
"I think you cannot fairly complain of life, Liane. What have you asked of it that you have failed to get? Success, money, power, adulation----"
"Never love."
"The world would find it difficult to believe that."
"Ah, love of a sort, yes: the love that is the desire to possess and that possession satisfies."
"Have you asked for any other sort?"
"I ask it now. I know what the love is that longs to give, to give and give again, asking no return but kindness, understanding, even toleration merely. It is such love as this I bear you, Michael. But you do not believe...."
Divided between annoyance and distaste, he was silent. And all at once she threw herself half across the joined arms of their chairs, catching his shoulders with her hands, so that her half-clothed body rested on his bosom, and its scented warmth assailed his senses with the seduction whose power she knew so well.