"It is true! You know it! Stand up; look in the mirror! See yourself as you can be, with jewels in your hair, against your neck, in dresses that are worth hundreds, in furs that are worth thousands! Do you think you could go in any assembly, theater or restaurant, but every one wouldn't turn in amazement?"
She felt troubled, struggling against a heavy lassitude, regretting that she had given him this opportunity; and instinctively, by a force beyond her control, she raised her eyes to the mirror at the end of the room, and saw a little girl in a simple dress, her hair in a confusion of golden curls, and behind her the triumphant woman he had conjured to her eyes.
"No coffee!" she said, nervously averting her eyes from his eager gaze. "It's hot, dreadfully hot, in here."
There came a moment's pause, a lull after the first skirmish, during which he lighted a cigar and waited, well content.
"It's all a question of opportunity," he began again, while her troubled eyes went past him to the mirror of the future. "You can do now what you can't do later! Do you want to end in a boarding-house, Miss Baxter?"
"Why do you—care for me?" she asked him abruptly.
"In the beginning, because you resisted me," he said, turning his cigar in his fingers. "Now, because you hate me!"
"And knowing that I hate you, you want me?"
"A thousand times more!" he said, and for the first time the greed and hunger rose in his eyes. But quickly he controlled himself.
"The moment I stopped resisting you, you would not care!" she said slowly.