“Said! You’d madden any man with your stiff airs of prudery.”
“I’ve begged you not to ask Milligan here.”
“I shall ask him as often as I like. He’s useful. You’ll please be civil to everybody who’s useful—to Sutton in particular. You treat the fellow as if he were——”
“The cur he is,” she concluded scornfully.
“You’re no good if you can’t help me to play my game. That is why you are here, confound you,” he cried savagely. “You don’t think”—his sneer was devilish—“that I married you because I had such a supreme longing for fireside virtue.”
“They are all alike—your men,” she cried out passionately. “They regard me as—as—I cannot finish.”
She buried her disfigured face in her hands. Every line of her shaking body was crouching, subjective; she was a human hound with a brute for a master, a brute on whom she fawned.
“It’s new for you to be so particular.”
“I—I don’t understand.” She lifted her face suddenly; let him see it all grotesquely distorted, drawn out of shape.
“I repeat; it is new for you to be so particular. If you can throw yourself into the arms of one man——”