His face flushed deeply as he heard her now.
'I wonder if you have any conception of what bitterly cruel things you say?' he exclaimed. 'Or are the subjects of your vivisection too infinitesimally small in your eyes for you to remember their possible pain?'
'My dear Otho! I do not think a truth should ever be painful to any candid mind!' she replied, with a little merciless laugh. 'If a man and woman, who know each other as well as we do, cannot say the truth to one another, who is ever to make any psychological studies at all?'
'No one does that has any real feeling in him or in her,' said Othmar impatiently. 'All those elaborate examinations under the glass are cold as ice. They are very scientific, no doubt, but there is not a heart throb in them.'
'I think the greatest pleasure of strong emotion is the analysis of it,' she replied with perfect truth. 'You are not philosophic, you are poetic. So you do not understand what I mean.'
'You mean,' said Othmar angrily, 'that when Hero saw Leander's dead body washed up to her arms from the waves, she was amply compensated for his death by the advantage of putting her own tears under the spectrum!'
'That is an exaggerated illustration. But I admit that the mental intricacies of every passion is what is alone interesting in it to me.'
'It is why you have never felt passion!'
'Perhaps!'