"What you—what you thought of your own!"
"Yes. What I thought of my own spurious, contemptible, heartless, soulless, hateful work."
"Claude!" she faltered.
"Don't you know it is so? Don't you know I am right? You may have deceived yourself in Algeria. You may have deceived yourself even here at all the rehearsals. But, Charmian"—his eyes pierced her—"do you dare to tell me that to-night, when you were part of an audience, when you were linked with those hundreds and hundreds of listeners, do you dare to tell me you didn't know to-night?"
"How can you—oh, how can you speak like this? Oh, how can you attack your own child?" she cried, finding in herself still a remnant of will, a remnant of the fierceness that belongs to deep feeling of any kind. "It's unworthy. It's cruel, brutal. I can't hear you do it. I won't—"
"Do you mean to tell me that to-night when you sat in the theater you didn't know? Well, if you do tell me so I shall not believe you. No, I shall not believe you."
She was silent, remembering her sense of struggle in the theater, her strong feeling that she was engaged on a sort of horrible, futile fight against the malign power of the audience.
"You see!" he said. "You dare not tell me you didn't know!"
His eyes were always upon her. She opened her lips. She tried to speak, to say that she loved the opera, that she thought it a work of genius, that everyone would recognize it as such soon, very soon, if not now, immediately. Words seemed to be struggling up in her, but she could not speak them. She felt that she was growing paler and paler beneath his gaze.
"Thank God!" he exclaimed, with violence. "You've got some sincerity left in you. We want it, you and I, to-night!"