Then a sudden certainty of his intention came upon her with a burst of angry horror, but she swept this off and waited coolly, with a sort of sneering excitement.
Strange drew his chair farther forward and sat facing her.
“Miss Waring,” he said, “I have come to ask if you will listen to the shady side of a man’s life.”
There was no more tremble or hesitation about him now, he looked as cool as she did.
“It is a side that men as a rule keep to themselves and to their male companions, no matter how near a man and a woman come to each other, this impalpable barrier keeps them apart. This has always struck me as a rather low form of lie and distinctly dishonourable, especially practised, as it is, by the stronger on the presumably weaker. If a woman is not strong and pure and magnanimous enough to bear this knowledge, a man should find it out and go his way before he has dared to touch her life; if she is strong enough she should be given the opportunity of gaining this knowledge at first hand, and taking her subsequent course accordingly. You are immeasurably nobler than any other woman who has crossed my path.”
Involuntarily he lowered his head as he spoke, in a reverential way that touched Gwen and forced her to hear him. After the first disgusted shock her impulse had been to send him about his business. She had half risen from her seat on the spur of this impulse, but somehow she had sat down again, and in spite of herself she had let him speak.
“No decent man could deceive you,” he went on, “even if every word he spoke were to cut his own throat. May I speak to you as man to man?”
He watched the palpitations of her throat—which unfortunately were beyond her control—with a sort of choking sensation—
“Or more,” he added simply, “as if you were God.”
Gwen’s colour neither increased nor left her, she neither trembled nor stirred. For a minute she was quite silent except for one quick little swallowing sound, she was fighting with a concentrated restrained frenzy of despair against her fate, against the overpowering longing to hear this man, as he sat there ready to spoil his own life sooner than lie to her even in a fashion recognized by the use of generations.