"You and her. You've come back to me as my friend. We'll be better friends if you understand that, whatever I let you do, dear, I'm not going to let you make love to me."
She drew herself back and faced him with her resolution.
She knew the man with whom she had to deal. His soul must be off its guard before she could have any power over his body. In presenting herself as unattainable she would make herself desired. She would bring him back.
She knew what fires he had passed through on his way to her. She saw that she could not bring him back by playing poor, tender Maggie's part. She could not move him by appearing as the woman she once was, by falling at his feet as she had once fallen. This time, it was he who must fall at hers.
Anne Majendie had held her empire, and had made herself for ever desirable, by six years of systematic torturings and deceptions and denials, by all the infidelities of the saint in love with her own sanctity. The woman who was to bring him back now would have to borrow for a moment a little of Anne Majendie's spiritual splendour. She saw by his flaming face that she had suggested the thing she had forbidden.
"You think," said she, "there isn't any danger? I don't say there is. But if there was, you'd never see it. You'd never think of it. You'd be up to your neck in it before you knew where you were."
He moved impatiently. "At any rate I know where I am now."
"And I," said she, in response to his movement, "mean that you shall stay there." She paused. "I know what you're thinking. You'd like to know what right I have to say these things to you."
"Well—I'm awfully stupid—"
"I earned the right fifteen years ago. When a woman gives a man all she has to give, and gets nothing, there are very few things she hasn't a right to say to him."