“I know I’ve no business to speak to you,” he said. “No business to come after you. I know that. But I was always a selfish, violent, headlong brute, and it seems I can’t change.”
“But what do you want with me?”
Suddenly she remembered—put her hands up to her face with a swift gesture, then dropped them again. What did it matter now? He was the last man who would look upon her in life. And now that she remembered her own condition she saw his. She saw the terror of his life in his marred features, aged, brutalised by excess. She saw, and was glad for a moment, as if she met someone unexpectedly on her side of the stream of fate. Let him look upon her. She was looking upon him.
“What do you want?” she repeated.
“I want a saviour,” he said, staring always straight at her, and speaking without tenderness.
“A saviour!”
For a moment she thought of the Bible, of religion; then of her sensation that she had been caught by a torturer who would not let her go.
“Have you come to me because you think I can tell you of saviour?” she said.
And she began to laugh.
“But don’t you see me?” she exclaimed. “Don’t you see what I am now?”