She smiled and stretched her arms indolently above her head as she lay back amongst her cushions.
'I have always perfectly understood,' she continued, 'that unjustly abused lady of the legend who flung her glove into the lions' den; she wanted emotions and she had the whole gamut of them no doubt in those few moments—fear, hope, pride, triumph, discomfiture; she must have known all that it is possible to know of emotion in those three minutes.'
'You have often thrown your glove.'
'Do you mean that for a rebuke? Your tone is gloomy. Yes, I have thrown it, but they have always brought it back to me like lap-dogs. There is too much of the lap-dog in men.'
'In me?' said Othmar with anger.
'Yes, in you too. You would go for my glove still.'
'Yes, I would, God help me.'
She laughed. 'I am sure you would, at present. I suppose the time will come when you will go for some other woman's. It is in your nature to do that sort of thing.'
Othmar was irritated and wounded: he was tired of this eternal jesting. His fidelity to her was the most real and the most sensitive thing in all his life, and yet he had the conviction that in her heart she ridiculed him for it.
'Still, I think you of all women would be most intolerant of inconstancy,' he said, speaking almost unconsciously his own thoughts aloud.