'No,' he said, sharply and sternly, but he did not withdraw his hand.
'Why not?' she said, with her whole person swayed towards him as by an irresistible impulse. 'Why do you affect to be of ice? You are not indifferent to me. You only obey what you think a law of honour. Why do you try to do that? There is only one law—love.'
He strove to draw away from him, but feebly, the clinging of her warm fingers. The caress of her breath on his cheek, the scent of the roses in her breast intoxicated him for the instant. She bent nearer and nearer, and still held him closely in her slender hands, which were as strong as steel.
'You love me?' she murmured, so low that it scarce stirred the air, and yet had all the potency of hell in it. A shudder went over him;. the baseness of voluptuous impulse and the revulsion of conscious shamefulness shook his strength as though it were a reed in the wind. For a moment his arms enclosed her, his heart beat against hers; then he thrust her away from him and rose to his feet.
'Love, you? No, a thousand times, no!' he said with unutterable scorn. 'You are a shameless temptress; you can rouse the beast that lies hid in all men. I despise you, I detest you—I could kiss you and kill you in a breath; but love!—how dare you speak the word? Mine is hers; I am hers: if I sinned to her with you I would strangle you when I awoke!'
All the fierceness and the barbaric strength of the blood of desert and of steppe broke up in him from underneath the courtesy and calm of many long years of culture. He was born of men who had slain their mistresses for a glance, and ravished; their captives in war, and yielded them to no release but death, and his hereditary instincts broke the bonds of custom and of habit, and spoke in him now as a wild animal breaks its bars and leaps up in frank brutality of wrath. He thrust her backward and backward from him, rose to his feet, wrenched aside with rude hand the eastern stuffs that hung before the door, and left her presence and her house before any power of voice or movement had come back to her.
As he pushed past the waiting servants in the vestibule, and went through the courtyard and the gateway, he looked up once again at the stars shining overhead.
'Wanda! Wanda!' he said with a deep breath, as men may call in their extremity on God.