But the minister was still unresponsive.
"It was a queer way for love to act," he protested, and again with that comprehensive gesture which called accusing notice to the ruin pulled down upon him.
"But will you not understand?" she pleaded. "It was the last desperate resource of love. I could not reach the real you. I tried for weeks. I endured insufferable associations. I assumed distasteful interests—all to put myself in your company; to keep you in mine; to create those proximities, those environments and situations in which love grows naturally. Again and again I thought that love was springing up. But I was disappointed. You did not respond. What I thought at first was response was only sympathy. To you I was no longer a woman. I was a subject in spiritual pathology.
"When I saw this, first it irritated, then maddened me. I knew that you were not yourself, that your environment had insulated you. That you were so interested in the part which you were playing,—so absorbed by the duty of being a public idol, that you could not be yourself, the man, the flesh, the heart, I know you are.
"In desperation I resolved to strip you, to hurl you down, to rob you of the public regard, of your church, of everything; to strip you until you were nothing but the man who once held me in his arms, his whole body quivering, and demanding with all his nature to possess me."
As the woman spoke, her voice had risen, and a half-insane enthusiasm was gleaming on her face, while her fingers reached restlessly after the minister who, as unconsciously as she advanced, receded until he stood cornered against the door.
"Now," she continued, in her frenzied exaltation of mood, "it is done! You see how easily it was accomplished. Nothing should be so disillusioning, so reawakening to you as to observe how light is your hold upon this community, how selfish and insincere was all this public adulation. I, a stranger almost, of whom these people knew nothing, was able, with a ridiculously impossible charge, to brush you from your eminence like a fly.
"Of what worth has it all been? Of what worth all that you can do for people like these? Your very church is turning against you. It will cast you out."
A shade had crossed the brow of Hampstead.
"You think that?" he asked defiantly.