"Well, no! I will never consent! You shall never have a divorce so long as I can stop it! Go, live with your mistress."
"She is not my mistress!" he said, white with anger.
"A girl on the stage! You are ridiculous! You will make yourself the laughing-stock of New York, my dear fellow, with your little girl! And you think she loves you? Fool! don't you know what her game is?"
"Don't judge all women by yourself, Clara Bayne!" he said between his teeth, giving her her girlhood name. But instantly, digging his nails in his hands, he said in a different tone: "I beg your pardon! I am very irritated, in a very nervous state. I don't want to lose control of myself! Clara, you are too generous, too honest a woman, deliberately to force her to be my mistress!"
"I force her?" she cried furiously. "If she has taken the love of a married man, she is that already! Let her go on!"
"Do you mean this?" he said sternly.
"I certainly do!"
"You will not give the woman I love and respect the right to be my wife—to love me honestly before the world? Do you mean this?"
"I am your wife, and you shall never take that from me!"
"You have never been my wife!" he cried, beside himself. "You, a pure girl, deliberately set about to win me, as a cocote does! Wife? You have taken my money to pay for your pleasures and your luxuries, and you have not even been my mistress! You a moral woman!"