She laughed lightly.
“Do you understand what they’re saying of you?” he went on.
“Where?”
“All over London.”
“Perhaps.”
“But—do you?”
“Perhaps I don’t care to.”
“They’re saying—‘Poor thing! But it’s her own fault.’”
There was a silence. In it he looked at her hard, mercilessly. She returned his gaze, still smiling.
“And it is your own fault,” he went on after a moment. “If you had been yourself she couldn’t have insulted you first and humiliated you afterwards. Oh, how I hate it! And yet—yet there are moments when I am like the others, when I feel—‘She has deserved it.’”