“I? A—a rupture?”
“Yes,” she said hotly; “do you?”
“Do you, Sylvia?”
“No; I'm too cowardly, too selfish, too treacherous to myself. No, I don't.”
“Nor do I,” he said, lifting his furtive eyes.
“Very well. You are more contemptible than I am, that is all.”
Her voice had grown unsteady; an unreasoning rush of anger had set her whole body a-thrill, and the white heat of it was driving her to provoke him, as though that might cleanse her of the ignominy of the bargain—as though a bargain did not require two of the same mind to make it.
“What do you want of me?” she said, still stinging under the angry waves of self-contempt. “What are you marrying me for? Because, divided, we are likely to cut small figures in our tin-trumpet world? Because, united, we can dominate the brainless? Is there any other reason?”
Showing his teeth in that twitching snicker that contracted the muscles of his upper lip: “Children!” he said, looking at her.
She turned scarlet to her hair; the deliberate grossness stunned her. Confused, she stood confronting him, dumb under a retort the coarseness of which she had never dreamed him capable.