"OK. Do you view it that way?"
"I do.... But we dogs were invented for it. After all, I suppose we prefer to live our dogs' lives to any other—we human Fidos——"
"Phil! You never before gave me any reason to believe you a cynical materialist. And you have been very unjust and disagreeable to me. Do you know it?"
"I'm tired of running at your heels, I suppose.... A dog knows when he's welcome.... After a while the lack of mutual sympathy gets on his nerves, and he strays by the roadside.... And sometimes, if lonely, the owner of another pair of heels will look behind her and find him paddling along.... That's the life of the dog, Helen—with exceptions like that cur of Bill Sykes. But the great majority of pups won't stay where they're lonely for such love as they offer. For your dog must have love.... The love of the human god he worships. Or of some other god."
He laughed lightly:
"And I, who worship a goddess for her divine genius and her loveliness—I have trotted at her heels a long, long time, Helen, and I'm just beginning to understand, in my dog's heart, that my divinity does not want me."
"I—I do want you!"
"No, you don't. You haven't enough emotion in you to want anybody. You're too complete, too self-satisfied, too intellectual, too clever to understand a heart's desire—the swift, unselfish, unfeigned, uncalculated passion that makes us human. There's nothing to you but intellect and beauty. And I'm fed up!"
The girl rose, flushed and disconcerted by his brutality. Grayson got up, bland, imperturbable, accepting her departure pleasantly.
She meant to go back all alone down the hillside; that was evident in her manner, in her furious calmness, in her ignoring the tiny handkerchief which he recovered from the moss and presented.