“Does it need explanation?”
“Oh—please!”
“Then—one of my best pals was a man who loved you.”
Magda threw him a glance of veiled mockery from beneath her long white lids.
“Surely that should be a recommendation—something in my favour?”
His eyes hardened.
“If you had dealt honestly with him, it might have been. But you drew him on, made him care for you in spite of himself. And then, when he was yours, body and soul, you turned him down! Turned him down—pretended you were surprised—you’d never meant anything! All the old rotten excuses a woman offers when she has finished playing with a man and got bored with him. . . . I’ve no place for your kind of woman. I tell you”—his tone deepening in intensity—“the wife of any common labourer, who cooks and washes and sews for her man day in, day out, is worth a dozen of you! She knows that love’s worth having and worth working for. And she works. You don’t. Women like you take a man’s soul and play with it, and when you’ve defiled and defaced it out of all likeness to the soul God gave him, you hand it back to him and think you clear yourself by saying you ‘didn’t mean it’!”
The bitter speech, harsh with the deeply rooted pain and resentment which had prompted it, battered through Magda’s weak defences and found her helpless and unarmed. Once she had uttered a faint cry of protest, tried to check him, but he had not heeded it. After that she had listened with bent head, her breath coming and going unevenly.
When he had finished, the face she lifted to him was white as milk and her mouth trembled.
“Thanks. Well, I’ve heard my character now,” she said unsteadily. “I—I didn’t know anyone thought of me—like that.”