Dion moved abruptly like a man in physical pain, but Mrs. Clarke continued:
“I don’t ask you to forgive me for hurting you. You and I must be frank with each other, or we can be of no use to each other. After what has happened many women might be inclined to avoid me as your wife did. Fortunately I have so many friends who believe in me that I am in a fairly strong position. I don’t want to weaken that position on account of Jimmy. Now, if you came to Buyukderer under an assumed name, I couldn’t introduce you to any one, or explain you without telling lies. Gossip runs along the shores of the Bosporus like fire along a hayrick. How can I be seen perpetually with a man whom I never introduce to any of my friends, who isn’t known at his own Embassy? Both for your own sake and for mine we must be frank about the whole thing.”
“But I never said I should come to Buyukderer,” he said.
And there was a sort of dull, lifeless obstinacy in his voice.
“You have come to Constantinople and you will come to Buyukderer,” she replied quietly.
He looked at her across the room. The light was beginning to fade, but still the awnings were drawn down beyond the windows, darkening the large bare room. He saw her as a study in gray and white, with colorless, unshining hair, a body so thin and flexible that it was difficult to believe it contained nerves like a network of steel and muscles capable of prolonged endurance, a face that was haggard in its white beauty, eyes that looked enormous and fixed in the twilight. The whole aspect of her was melancholy and determined, beautiful and yet almost tragic. He felt upon him the listless yet imperative grasp which he had first known in Mrs. Chetwinde’s drawing-room, the grasp which resembled Stamboul’s.
“I suppose I shall go to Buyukderer,” he said slowly. “But I don’t know why you wish it.”
“I have always liked you.”
“Yes, I think you have.”
“I don’t care to see a man such as you are destroyed by a good woman.”